I just got finished reading a big, breathless feature about Microsoft’s counter-attack on Google.
It’s Clueless. And hopeless. It’s amazing that 14 years after the Web was spun a company can be this hopelessly stupid.
What’s so stupid? It’s Microsoft’s reliance on advertising, specifically "display" and "video" advertising. Microsoft is talking to big New York advertisers, telling them they should place their money with Microsoft because they do more big display and video ads on Web sites than Google does.
Well, they do. But advertising isn’t sales. And all the nifty tools Microsoft has announced to track the impact of its ads aren’t sales. Otherwise we’d buy stuff of billboards, not Craigslist.
The strength of the Web is not how well it can target advertising, or track advertisements. The strength of the Web lies in how it can replicate the entire marketing process — everything from making the initial connection to the pitch, through the transaction and customer service.
By focusing on advertising, and advertisers, Microsoft is missing the whole point of the Web.
Advertising is just one flashy piece of a much larger process. It happens to be the one piece that the folks selling goods and services have total control over. Which is why they focus so intently on it.
But it’s just one piece, and a fairly minor piece at that.
Many companies spend up to half their budgets moving their merchandise. This includes the ads, finding the place to run the ads, tracking the ads, making the sale, and handling the returns. How much of that budget can Microsoft earn with this new strategy?
Not much.
But there’s a far more important point in play here.
Control.
The reason Microsoft, and advertisers, are focused so much on advertising is it’s the part of the buyer-seller relationship they’re most in control of.
The whole point of the Internet is to loosen control, to put the customer in control. The whole point of a scaled search engine is to give the consumer total control over what they want to find and how they want to find it. The whole point of the shady business known as SEO is to fight the search engine over that control, and try to seize it back for whomever is paying.
A true Internet marketing campaign will accept this loss of control, not fight it. It will encompass whole new classes of editorial media, especially those which deliver the greatest credibility to readers. And it will take a completely different attitude toward the customer, a recognition that they’re active and not passive.
There’s an analogy to education here — out with the sage on the stage, in with the guide at the side.
Marketers are guides to their merchandise, how to use it, how to get the most value from it, how to maximize the customer experience. That means they should be delivering tons of honest information wherever they can, funneling those who are interested as a result toward more relevant, personal information, then after they go through the sales funnel following up and making certain they’re satisfied.
In terms of a budget this doesn’t differ as much as you might think from how companies now spend their money. The difference lies in the way they spend it.
As soon as the customer agrees to be identified, the marketer should bring all their knowledge about the customer to bear, through requests for more. And all the interactions between marketers and the customers should provide an audit trail, not so you can tell the customer where they went wrong but so you can improve your own service.
The deeper your relationship with a customer the more loyal they become. The better the relationship the more "pass-along" buyers you’re likely to earn.
Now do you see anything about any of this in Microsoft’s strategy to beat Google?
I don’t either.
The job of a tech vendor in this world is not to help the business customer spend their money. It’s to bring all your resources to bear toward making that spending count. So you work with them on a host of services — CRM, ERP, etc. etc. etc. — and help them improve their whole company.
You don’t just sell them a billboard and think you’ve done your job.
