Marketing Myopia

Marketing Myopia

Of the many examples of marketing myopia in progress today across a wide variety of industries, one of the most visible is that of Microsoft' efforts to get back into the mobile phone and operating systems business. With Apple having the world's leading market share from a device standpoint and Google Android challenging them for leadership, Microsoft shows how devastating it is to rely on the five factors defined in the section a Manifesto, Not a Prescription in the well-known article Marketing Myopia (Levitt, 1975). The intent of this analysis is to define a product strategy for Microsoft's mobile device and operating system business that will maximize their brand value and mitigate and help avoid historical marketing errors made in the past.

Marketing Myopia at Microsoft

Companies that often have an exceptional level of commercial success based on technological prowess alone often fall victim to the worst strains of marketing myopia. When technology alone is relied on as a means to differentiate a product and define a market instead of customer orientation, innovation is stifled and avenues of growth ignored (Drucker, 1985). Microsoft had initially entered the mobile device industry with a de-featured version of the operating system, reasoning that a lower level of cost could be achieved by reducing feature count. The economics of building products need to be secondary to making a product that can address current and future customer expectations, needs and deliver exceptionally strong experiences. Microsoft however did not operate from this perspective, and chose to research only the adoption of their existing line of operating systems against low-end price bands, not against an entirely new paradigm of collaboration and communication. One of the more prevalent aspects of a marketing strategy that becomes myopic over time is the tendency to rely on research to further justify and protect its position as a product-centric business (Andrus, Reinmuth, 1979). Microsoft had done this with the first iterations of their mobile computing strategy including the initial development efforts on the Windows Phone operating system.

Another aspect of Microsoft's myopic vision of mobile computing is the lack of focus on partnership alliances and the ability to define a suitable 3rd party platform framework. The inclusion of Nokia at present is only after several failed attempts with other partners who could not align with the requirements Microsoft had at the operating system and platform level. Instead of creating a series of Application Programmer Interface (API) routines Microsoft chose instead to require hardware partners to pay for an OEM contract for the software. Competitors including Apple and Google make API toolkits, development systems and free versions of their operating systems to further promote the development of next-generation applications on their platform. Microsoft, again forced into a myopic mindset, chose to look at partners and service providers not as part of a customer-driven ecosystem but as another source of potential revenue over time. This limited the brand value of Microsoft in mobile and initially made hardware partners and service providers consider moving more in the direction of Apple and especially Google, two companies who were, as Peter Drucker observed, using customer insights to drive greater disruptive innovation (Drucker, 2002) Microsoft's recent decision to launch latest mobile operating system without an actual launch date of the devices further shows their myopic nature as well.

Recommended Microsoft Mobile Product Strategy

For Microsoft to cure its myopic view of the mobile computing market it must begin with its product strategy. it's reliance on hardware partners and service providers for their revenue first and support for their phone operating system needs to stoop. Instead of attempting to make these critical members of their value chain pay for the privilege of earning revenue, they need to instead look at how they can make these partners successful. The essence of any successful entrepreneurial strategy is in creating significant value for the customer (Drucker, 1985). Microsoft needs to shift towards a more open API-based product strategy that allows for more rapid innovation from hardware and services partners both. This direction alone will help Microsoft to compete more effectively over the long-term, by giving them the ability to compete for precious developer resources and times with partners and service providers.

Second, Microsoft needs to think more about their phone strategy from the standpoint of how they can create the smartphone of the future as a computing platform. One of the best strategies for accomplishing this is to concentrate on having their operating systems be more oriented towards creating a technology-agnostic platform for social media websites and applications. The advent of social media websites have given every customer a much greater level of communication and clarity, so much so that an individual consumer can now have as much of an impact on the performance of a business as the largest corporate customer (Bernoff, Li, 2008). Microsoft needs to respect this specific aspect of the behavior of customers they are building their next-generation operating systems for. Third, Microsoft needs to re-orient their entire product strategy to make their hardware providers' smartphones much easier to sell and service. Today they follow the model of traditional PCs.