Microsoft has a new campaign to market its office products and information worker tools. Check out their new website to 'Experience the Microsoft Office System' - it includes an interactive area that explains the information worker productivity capabilities in Office 2003.
If you are curious about my experience and impression of the campaign, ...
The site opens with an elevator intro - which is cute the first time you visit the site, but a 'skip intro' candidate there after... Overall, I'm pretty impressed with the creativity behind their campaign (dinosaurs going extinct) and think they've done a good job at creating a site that promotes exploration and learning... Its a pretty big change from their past marketing efforts, but I feel there is room for improvement in terms of tieing the tools and business scenarios together in a tighter message. Gotta give them a thumbs-up for the new UX direction though...
The campaign is intended to educate people about new ways of improving productivity and work habits and ultimately encourage upgrading the office tools.
The site does a great job of breaking down the new capabilities of the Office System and promoting the new collaboration and information management features. That said, I wonder if they missed an opportuntity to tie those capabilities together with the real pains that people suffer from today.
I found it interesting that an MS ad in a Saturday Night magazine shows a disorganized desk of an employee that has hit the 'reply all' email button by accident. Everyone has done that before and can relate, but is that painful experience enough to drive users to their new site in order to learn how the office system can help?
This cross-channel marketing strategy has the right idea, but I think their approach of showing an 'oops' pain isn't enough and the "there is a better way" to work message is not as strong as it could be. Like some marketing campaigns, it leaves the customer in a position to connect the dots on their own and my fear is that it won't drive traffic to the site.
I bet that 'if' a target information worker finds the site, they may have difficulty exploring/finding the features that align with their business pains because it wasn't designed that way. If an IT manager comes across the site, they will likely find its more educational in nature, and still leave them with the job of ultimately aligning the capabilities with their organizational pains.
A different (potentially more effective) approach could have been to start by demonstrating the common information worker pains to help users qualify their need and then educate them on the features and capabilities of the Office system that will positively impact their job.
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