CASE STUDY REPORT
The Xbox One Launch: From Crisis to Contender for the All-in-One Games and Entertainment System. By Microsoft, Assembly, a Daniel J. Edelman Holdings company.
5 months prior to the launch of Microsoft’s Xbox One, the gaming platform faced negativity from its core gaming audience and also faced stiff competition from Sony’s Playstation 4.
Research
In order to assist their campaign, Microsoft conducted various primary and secondary researches, which formed the integrated communication approach:
Firstly, Microsoft’s marketing department researched on propriety audience segmentation, which helped them determine Xbox One’s primary target audiences which can be split into two groups: Gaming Firsts and Game and Entertainment
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The second was to illustrate that Xbox One has the best game licenses and gaming experiences.
The third objective was to prove the global Xbox One all-in-one value proposal and vision.
In order to reach these objectives and the overarching goal, a few strategies were put into place.
Strategy, Tactics and Implementation
The key strategy they used was that of a proactive strategy (action).
To win back their core gamers, they fixated on changing their tone and taking charge of their message. The focused platform to do so on was the new Xbox platform, Xbox Wire, which launched in May 2013.
The PR department used Xbox Wire to inform the publics on the reversal of the two controversial product policies.
To add on, new content was published daily. Between the E3 convention in June and the Xbox One launch in November, over 300 posts were generated. Xbox Wire became a reliable platform to communicate and inform Xbox fans on news.
To focus on “showing, not telling”, a series of aggressive hands-on engagements were conducted before the launch of the Xbox
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This definitely helped boost brand recognition and strengthen stakeholders faith in the brand as well as brand equity. However, improvements can be made.
They could improve their evaluation by using more social media outlets such as instagram and Facebook. They could have also used hash tags to track the volume of buzz the Xbox One was creating.
To add on, they missed out marketing in a large area: China. China has a US$13.5 billion online gaming industry and Xbox One was the first console to be released since the law prohibiting production and sale of gaming consoles was rescinded. With 598million estimated number of active social networking users in China, Microsoft could have rode on this more by advertising on social media sites such as Weibo and Tencent’s QZone.
According to the Business Insider, Chinese gamers are not used to paying for games. Microsoft could thus release more games that charge fees after a free trial to help boost