Marketing maestro Chris Capossela on company cool
Microsoft global chief marketing officer Chris Capossela tells Hamish McNicol how the company became cool, sort of.
Microsoft Word isn’t cool. Spreadsheet tool Excel, one of Microsoft’s ‘‘crown jewels’’, definitely isn’t cool.
Powerpoint? Nope. Even its app development tool, Visual Studio, isn’t cool.
These seemed like surprising statements for Microsoft’s global chief marketing officer to make, but Chris Capossela said it was exactly the time the company stopped trying to be cool, that, funnily enough, it became cooler.
‘‘We didn’t set out to sit around and say, ‘How can we be cooler than Apple?’
‘‘We never set out to do the black turtle neck and the jeans, you know what I mean?’’ ‘‘It’s just not who we are.’’ Instead, Capossela traced Microsoft’s transformation back to the 2014 appointment of the company’s third chief executive, just its third in about 40 years, Satya Nadella.
Capossela, in New Zealand this week, said Nadella took the opportunity to reset Microsoft and think about what culture it wanted to create, as well as what it stood for.
Wallowing in its reality, he called it, which led to the question: why would the world be worse off if Microsoft just went away?
Microsoft believed the world had shifted to mobile-first, cloudfirst, and while it had enjoyed incredible financial success, Capossela said the company was not where it wanted to be with products for people beyond the personal computer.
‘‘Probably not great things were going to happen for the company.
‘‘Asking ‘Where is the world headed and how relevant is Microsoft?’ was a really important exercise for us to go through. It made us really change course and go after things that prior, we hadn’t been going after with as much gusto shall I say?’’
The answer to Microsoft’s place in the world took a while to reach, but they landed on the word ‘‘empowerment’’.
Capossela, who has been at Microsoft more than 25 years, said where Apple stood for ‘‘cool’’ and Facebook stood for ‘‘sharing’’, Microsoft had decided to embrace empowerment as its ethos, something which Nadella had constantly used in his messaging, rather than as a buzzword for three months.
Empowerment basically stood for giving people the tools to do cool things, rather than focusing on being a cool company.
‘‘Word is not cool, it’s amazing, it’s not cool, the books are the cool things people do with it.
‘‘Visual Studio, on the face of it, isn’t like this cool thing, but the apps people write with Visual Studio, it’s amazing.
‘‘If you actually focus on what our own people, what our own customers are trying to do, everything we make is really a tool that they’re using to try achieve more.’’
As a result, Capossela said the company had never been cooler.
‘‘It’s so crazy, people used to always ask me what are we going to do to be cool, I’m like, nothing, we’re going to try empower people.’’
This had also shifted Microsoft’s focus towards what it called its ‘‘fans’’.
Fans were people who not only used and loved a product, but somebody who also advocated for it.
For Microsoft Windows, which was used by about 1.5 billion people, fans represented about 17 to 19 per cent of users, but for something like the gaming console Xbox, it was much higher.
‘‘We’re not off trying to chase the iPhone lover who’s 14 years old and just got their first smartphone and wishing it was ours, no, it’s ok.
‘‘Catering to our fans as opposed to trying to convert the diehard fans of competitors, I think, has led us down a much, much better path.’’
We never set out to do the black turtle neck and the jeans, you know what I mean?