Wharton Tech Blog

Microsoft faced huge challenges with the launch of the Xbox 360. John Porcaro, Group Manager of PR Communications for Microsoft’s Home & Entertainment Division, responds to customer frustration surrounding the launch of Microsoft’s big bet in consumer electronics and gaming.

"Here’s the challenge," he writes, "Design a Go-To-Market campaign" given a list of 16 issues, including:

• "The product has a multi-year sales cycle with forecasts into the tens (hopefully hundreds) of millions of units"
• "The product doesn’t hold market majority, and competes against a product with significant market share advantage"
• "The product relies on follow-on sales (games) and licensing fees to be profitable
• "Coming out too early allows competitors to build their plans/product reacting to ours"
• "Coming out too late means our competitors have first-mover advantage, and can build games portfolio and customer base"
• "The customer you need to reach in the future has almost no awareness of your brand"

The central dilemma here is that the "hardcore gamer" demographic is pretty much in the bag. In order to grow marketshare, however, Microsoft must build awareness in the broader population, but to do so requires marketing that exacerbates short-term product shortages that enrage the early adopters. Tough job.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 3rd, 2005 at 6:27 pm and is filed under Consumer Tech/Digital Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.