Marketing Strengths and Weaknesses of Microsoft

Running head: MARKETING MANAGEMENT
MARKETING MANAGEMENT
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Response to Question 1: Marketing Strength and Weaknesses
Microsoft is a multinational technology company that is headquartered at
Washington. It was founded in the year 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. It is involved into
various developmental, manufacturing and licensing functions. The products offered by the
company are Windows, Office, Skype, Xbox, Surface, Dynamics, Servers, Mobiles and a
number of software. The services offered by the company are LinkedIn, Azure, Office 365,
Bing, One Drive, Outlook, Windows Store, Wallet, MSDN, Windows Update, Tech Net and
Xbox Live. The strategies of a company solely depend upon the goals and objectives of the
business. The company’s vision is to believe in what people make possible and the mission of
the company is to empower every organization and person living in this planet to achieve
more. The strong statements determine the strengths of the company, which are as follow:
i. The company has its operations spread over 190 countries all over the world.
ii. The operating system Windows 10 is widely accepted across the world and has
around more than 700 million installations.
iii. The annual revenue generated by the Microsoft Cloud is 23.2 billion dollars.
iv. It holds the 4th position having a market valuation of 750.6 billion USD.
v. It has a customer base of 60 million for the Office 365 and a base of 1.2 billion in
case of Microsoft Office Suite.
vi. Holds the 4th position in inter-brand structuring.
vii. Huge brand awareness.
viii. The current advertising strategy is ‘The future starts now’.
There has been a lot of innovation in the technologies and other sectors and the needs
and the preferences of the consumers have changed with time. The company needs to adapt to
these continuous changes in a flexible manner. Although Microsoft has tried its best still it
has the following weaknesses-

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i. The product line lacks innovation.
ii. Microsoft has overexposure to personal computer market and prices are increasing
because if the vendors (Patel 2017).
iii. There has been an increase in the cases of cybercrime that have made Microsoft
vulnerable.
iv. It is facing huge competition from Amazon and Apple in terms of technology and
innovation.
v. Most of the acquisitions of the company are not successful in nature.
Microsoft is one of the most valuable multinationals. It is listed in Forbes Top 100
Companies, every time. The company has a high brand value as well as high brand
awareness. If we consider the marketing mix of Microsoft, it can be seen that company has a
wide and range of products and services. It is distributed all over the world and only USA has
106 stores. There are overall 116 Microsoft stores worldwide. The products are also available
at online stores and are also distributed by authorized dealers. Previously the pricing strategy
was premium pricing but with the evolution it changed its pricing strategy by charging for the
software on a per-device basis and also charged subscriptions and licenses. It imitated the
pricing strategy of Apple by providing with free updates of the operating system after
releasing Windows 10 (Chao and Kavadias 2017, pp.5). The pricing strategy currently is
therefore a Freemium pricing strategy, which means offering the product at a premium price
with exclusive facilities for free (Allen 2017). All these marketing strategies have some
strengths and weaknesses associated with it that has been already discussed above. The
strengths suggest that:
i. The company has a wide market reach capacity.
ii. The data depict that the company has a high value of its brand name.
iii. It states that the company is one of the dominant players in the segment of software
(Chernev 2018).

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iv. The huge number of customer clearly states the strong and the loyal customer base
the company have. It states that the customers are very loyal to the company and does
not usually shift to the other products.
v. The value of the company suggests the huge capitalization rate it has.
vi. The inter-brand structuring states the high brand equity and high brand strength in the
digital world.
vii. The strengths reflects the effectiveness of the advertising strategies and the efficiency
of the same as it has acquired a huge customer base and created a high perceiving
value in the minds of the customers within a very short span.
The weaknesses suggest that:
i. The increasing price has made the company vulnerable which is very bad for the
future of the company.
ii. The lack of innovation suggests that the company is over confident with its
existing product line and is reluctant with respect to the competitions.
iii. The increase in the cybercrime denotes the security issues deficiency.
Response to Question 2: Organization’s competitive position and strategy
The competitive position of the company makes the company lead the market. The
competitive position of the company states how the company differentiates its products and
the services from the competitors in order to create a value for the targeted market. The
geographic segmentation of Microsoft states that it has segmented the market as a global
market place covering both the urban and the rural areas (Baker 2016, pp.25). It focuses on
both males and females but specially segmented to individuals of over and above 16 years of
age. It specifically targets the schools, colleges and the corporate. It targets the people having
an income more than 5 lakh per annum for example the senior grade employees, the IT
employees and others in a middle or higher level of administration (Palmatier and Crecelius