Making money even when your brand sucks

Posted on | November 28, 2006 | Comments Off

If you are one of those folks who is enough of a Microsoft fan to believe you have to dash out and get their new operating system, office suite and/or email client as soon as they are released, then I guess today is your big day … because it’s their big day.

I’m not such a big Microsoft fan but I’m not going to try to talk anybody out of it. I figure it’s your machine.

Anyway, if you are one of those folks, you might be interested in Information Week’s 100 Things You Must Know About Microsoft’s Most Important Product Launch Ever.

From what I’m seeing, they seem to at least have taken all the attacks against their OS seriously enough to have built a number of security features into the new release. I don’t know that they really care about their competitors all that much with 82% of market share but I don’t know that they were so nonchalant about how people talk about them.

That’s a weird brand issue, isn’t it? You have almost a monopoly, almost everybody uses your flagship product but at the same time your brand image really sucks. What do you do? Sob all the way to the bank? I mean, how much damage did Microsoft’s lousy reputation do them, really?

Bad brand image but good sales … go figure.

I guess this proves I’m not an expert on branding, huh?

[tags]Microsoft, Vista, brand image, marketing[/tags]