Zuned Out

People are too busy enjoying their Apple iPods to listen to Zune's marketing, so what is Microsoft going to do?

Spend more money on ads, of course!

It has already wasted millions on state-of-the-art web design, artsy films, and beautiful Peter Max-ish advertising.  The branding conceit was that Zune was all about sharing music, and had some built-in whatchamacallit to beam songs to other Zune devices.

Unfortunately, people already share music on their iPods: two people each grab an earbud and, voila, you've got sharing.  Hand the player to a friend.  Play songs on a computer.  Zune offered to fix a problem that nobody had.

The new campaign features a journey inside the Zune, which you can check out here.  Surreal imagery, a wacky cursor control, and faux hip music will let you, er, well, not really let you do anything, or tell you anything that matters.  Microsoft is going to spend oodles more money promoting this new position, as if it were wholly unlike the old position. 

"It's a launch to get the brand going -- our first big campaign," declares the head of the division, "...[and] once our company gets into something, it will not give up."  The new ad agency and digital vendors are salivating at the thought of Microsoft’s deep pockets, and its willingness to tolerate failure. 

Not me. I am willing to throw a branding strategy recommendation out into the cybervoid for free.

Yup.  Call it branding shareware, and Microsoft is hereby authorized to use, adapt, share, and claim credit for it without attribution, comment, paying royalties, or even saying thank you.  Here's my 4-step spiel:

First, nobody buys an iPod because of the cool ads, so stop focusing on Apple’s marketing. In fact, I'd venture to say that the ads are irrelevant to sales, beyond promoting simple awareness or recognition.  I'd go further and suggest that most consumers -- especially the smarty-pants folks Zune is mistakenly targeting (more on that in a bit) -- correlate a greater amount of creativity in branding with a higher degree of skepticism.  Their social communities are not impressed by glitz, convinced by fatuous claims, or tolerant of irrelevant content.

Microsoft asked the wrong people to solve the branding problem, and should be looking at everything but its ads: customer services, software interface, battery replacement, whatever.  It's in these areas, not in the minds of really smart marketing people, that it'll discover what it needs to promote.

That's because the second point is that prompting purchase is about doing something for consumers, not promoting brand.

The Zune folks had it right when they got it wrong with the the music sharing pitch.  At least it was a function.  The new approach doesn’t even pretend to offer a reason to buy a Zune.  The device homepage lists points, different price plans, live events, podcasts, yadda yadda.  It's all gloriously complicated, and leaves me wondering what exactly Zune does and, more importantly, how does it make it stupefyingly dumb and easy so that I could do it?

Positioning isn't about high-falutin branding attributes, it's about doing something people need done.  Forget emotions and the other psychobabble that funds branding guru slide presentations: successful branding is about doing one thing well.  You can't buy your way to that end, regardless of the depth of your pockets.  Zune needs to find a purpose other than being the anti-iPod.

Thirdly, I suspect that purpose has something to do with software.

The Microsoft exec leading the Zune charge admits that he knows as much, and that software is sorta kinda primarily what Microsoft does for a living.  It's never been in the machine business, per se, as even its XBOX 360 is really a glorified channel through which Microsoft can distribute (and charge for) content, like online gaming and, one day soon I'm sure, news, entertainment, etc.

Why again is it in the music player business?  There's no money to be made in distributing music (I don't think Apple makes much from iTunes, but it certainly helps it sell its high-margin iPod devices).  People don’t need a Zune to share pictures or video with one another, and those services would need to be free anyway.  Think of what low-cost mobile phones can already do, or that Google is going to get into the action. 

There's no obvious end game for a mass-market audio player coming from a software maker, not even a large and dominating one like Microsoft.

So Microsoft should come up with one. 

Again, that's not a question for the brand gurus, but rather a business strategy conversation.  Maybe if there were an obvious purpose to Zune, it could serve as the foundation for its positioning and brand marketing.  And I think any such positioning would have something to do with software that Microsoft could make money on writing, distributing, servicing, etc.  That would make true the "shaver/razor blades model" that so many critics talk about.

Fourth, this strategy would really need to shake things up.  Microsoft should stop talking about the market for .mp3 players, and instead look at defining a market (or markets) that it can serve and someday dominate.  Risk being truly different than iPod and all of its wanna-bes...give up...refocus...truly regroup, and then go for the gold.

Assuming it took the last three speil-points to heart, what strategies might shake things up?  Three ideas that are worth the cost of my cup of coffee while doing a thumbnail analysis:

• Target education.  Zune could be the device for recording lectures and interfacing with the online blackboards and other tools educators use to interact with their students.  Education programs and apps are giant sellers in Japan, where they mostly run on phones, PDAs, and portable game devices.  The Japanese often lead in technocultural matters, so why not copy the best?
• Become the mobile casual gaming device.  Did anybody at Microsoft catch word of the Wii's success?  Microsoft's own casual gaming site drives loads of traffic, and most people play dumb games on their mobile phones or laptops.  Why couldn't Zune be the best way to waste many more hours on this stuff?
• Sell solutions to old people (like me).  I'd imagine most Microsoft Vista customers use about 1% of the OS functionality, just like they never learned how to do anything more than hit play and record on their VCRs.  Software interfaces, online interactivity, and glowing stalagmites are just great for kids reared sometime near this century, but the rest of us (the we with all that buying power) still don't have a perfect music solution. 

So there...some shareware branding advice.  Maybe the best branding Zune could do would be to stop trying to brand itself as a music player.  Or, conversely, maybe going through the process of deciding what and why it actually is, maybe it'll find a reason to exist in the music business. 

If anything earth-shattering appears in Zune branding over the next few years, you'll know you read it here first.  So what if I don't get in on the gravy-train of helping it spend its doomed marketing dollars now? 

But I'm just a dim bulb.  Microsoft is just too Zuned Out to care either way.

Comments

[Jonathan]

it's intriguing to me that there's this not-so-secret undercurrent of Zune disappointment, almost as if we were all pulling for Microsoft to pull off something worth buying and using. I put myself in this group, certainly.

[Nathan Snell]

Great article. Very poignant. I enjoyed it (and will enjoy reading what other posts you put up soon).

I purchased a Zune before this latest relaunch (of the same bloody thing) instead of an iPod for 2 reasons.

1) Conversion of video for the Zune was easier.
2) The video playback (and screen) was much larger (which is especially important if reading subtitles).
3) To test out its "sharing" capability (which is downright worthless, even considering the amount of cracks and workarounds one can do).

The Zune allows a bit more customization, which I think is really neat and enjoy. All in all, though, I was looking for something as close to a portable media device as possible, which Apple now solved with the iPod Touch. Missed it again Microsoft, oops!

All in all, I think you hit a number of nails on the head, however, I'm not sure how off "sharing" was. I think one of the biggest problems with their sharing strategy is it required a pre-existing eco-system (of their media players) that didn't exist. If the iPod had wifi capability and the Zune interfaced with the iPod and provided something way awesome above it, that's a different story. Otherwise it goes back to what I think you nailed, in terms of "What's the benefit for user #1 compared to the iPod?" the answer is basically nothing.

[finn mckenty]

I do branding and product design/development, and we always talk about the Zune at work. On paper, they pretty much did everything right: the device looks nice and works well. The POP materials are very nicely done. The ads are cool, done by the right design firms that are experts at speaking to the early adopters and influencers that are key to creating a brand around lifestyle items like music players. If someone asked me to create a strategy for designing and launching a music player, I would have come up with pretty much exactly what MS has done.

Yet, absolutely nobody is even slightly interested in the Zune. Why?

What's the x factor, the missing ingredient that's kept it from taking off?

I think you hit on it at the beginning of this post: authenticity. The Zune is done precisely right, and perhaps that's the problem. It's too slick, it executes hipster-driven Scion formula a little too well, and perhaps consumers can see through it.

Just my $.02- great post!

[Gregg Blanchard]

You said in this article what I have been trying to put in words since the Zune came out. The Zune really is trying to satisfy needs that don't exist. In beginning marketing courses they teach you that its not what you think your customers need but what your potential customers think they need that really counts, i guess Microsoft forgot about that.

I agree 100% with everything except for the statement about iPod ads having no effect...I bought an iPod because I had always dreamed of being a silhouette with ear buds...

[Jonathan]

Thanks. Having loads of money isn't always a good thing. I wonder how patient Microsoft would be if there wasn't so much cash in the bank? Necessity is the Mother of Listening, along with Invention...

[Branding Blog]

It's not often that I say this but you kicked some serious butt in this article.

Microsoft is so far off they can't see trees or the forest.

But they won't listen...