Marketing

There has been a bit of talk today about reputation. What makes it, changes it, defines it? Seth thinks about why Snakes On A Plane tanked at the box office despite buzz and press attention over the past few months. Robert wonders why Microsoft retains its bad rep despite recent efforts to open up and start having real conversations with customers.

I like Seth’s conclusion that SOAP basically failed because the product sucked. “I’m afraid we come back to something that marketers have been struggling with for a really long time–the best way to succeed is to have a really great product.” It’s a movie made by committee, so it was bound to suck. This reputation was cemented in my brain before the marketing even started. I was hoping that SOAP would fail, so that I would not be subjected to a storm of promotions for even worse copycats.

Robert’s point is a little different, but still gets back to the fact that it is the products that define a company. The problem for Microsoft is that reputations take a very very long time to build, and Microsoft has only recently started opening up and conversing with customers. The products resulting from those conversations are just beginning to come to market.

I switched to Mac when they went Linux, and since then I had never felt the desire to use a Microsoft product until I saw Live Writer. Live Writer is something different that leads the market by integrating word processing and web publishing in a simple user friendly fashion. If Microsoft puts out a few more products like this, their reputation will eventually change.

In the end, the quality of the products is the thing that defines a companies reputation. Conversations help make better products, they help market products, but conversations don’t make products. Conversations, are full of arm chair philosophers who love to pontificate, but making a great product requires a team of highly focused obsessive individuals, who sometimes listen to and sometimes ignore the general consensus.