MICROSOFT OFFICE

Q. What is a new strategy for Microsoft Office to resolve their major issues?
In this technological era Microsoft Office is facing issues with engaging college students who are pretty
tech-savvy and up to date. Keeping in mind the increasing competition and low involvement of college
students, Microsoft needed some detailed insights of their target audience. For that, they carried out
ethnographic research using various tactics: diaries, focus groups and interviews covering wide array of
questions. Techniques and their results are described below:

1. Day Diaries
These were used by participants to update their activity status every 30 minutes on Twitter each
day. This helped Microsoft in gathering data about individuals’ daily activities, their online behavior,
deeper knowledge of undergrads students’ attitudes and role of technology in their lives. For this
type of study, Microsoft selected students who were Twitter users and differentiated them from
their Majors and GPA and the year of enrollment.

RESULTS:
As day diaries were used to collect data about students spending time on their personal and social
activities, work related and homework. Out of 5 respondents, only 1 seemed to be workaholic and
proved to be more productive regardless of great weather and his personal interests. He preferred
working and meeting deadlines of home work. Whereas, other 4 participants had mixture of
personal and social activities. They spent less time studying and more on watching tv shows and
going out with friends, calling friends and family members and cooking for themselves. They barely
spent an hour studying and one candidate was the procrastinator of all. He showed the least interest
in class and chose Facebook, gchat to pass his boring class.

2. Tech Diaries
Technology diaries were used by individuals to track down their usage time of mobile devices or
online(internet) each day. The time spent on smartphones was further divided into: SMS, phone
calls and others. Whereas, time spent on internet included use of Facebook, Google and other social
sites. This technique was assumed to provide more accurate data as observational data because of
online pattern of each individual other than academic reasons. The participants were basically
technology users owning smartphones and social media accounts.

RESULTS:
These are divided into three categories:
 Time spent on phone( Text, Call, Other)
The average time spent is 33mins, 36mins and 28mins respectively per day. This data set
showed that texts were majorly between friends, and calls took place between parents and
students out of them few were made through Facebook. Other than that, they spent time
on checking their emails, and Facebook and Google which is average of 28mins.
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Me on my phone
80

Time spent (mins)

60
40
20
0
1 2 3 4 5
Students

Text Call Other

 Time spent online for school

Average time spent online for school is 61mins of 5 students in a day. This was either spent
on doing group project on google docs or some research using search engines like Google,
Wikipedia and Investopedia. There were few who went online to check class website or to
email their professors. But, majority went online for google search which means Google is
the most common search engine among students at university.

Me Online for School

140
120
Time spent (mins)

100
80
60
40
20
0
1 2 3 4 5
Students

 Time spent online (Facebook, Google, Other)

The average time spent is 47mins, 39mins and 166mins respectively per day by 5 selected
students. As suggested ‘Other’ has the highest frequency which includes activities like
checking and organizing emails, college TV online, articles, AIM chat, web browsing, ESPN,
college newspaper. The maximum time spent online was on checking emails and responding
to them that means students use emails on daily basis which is more work/academic
related. Moreover, Facebook is used for chatting with friends or checking newsfeed that’s
done when students are bored so they go online to see what others have posted.
Whereas ,Google is
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used for gchatting, checking g-mails, and research work. This makes Google an all-in-one
package for any student as it provides social and academic benefits.

Me Online for Other Reasons

300
250
Time spent (mins)

200
150
100
50
0
1 2 3 4 5
Students

Facebook Google Other

3. Focus Groups
One of the research tactic used by the Microsoft team to gather the insights regarding
marketing strategies used by their competitors on different campuses was ‘’Focus groups’’.
In such tactic, the group dynamic was formularized in such a way (consisting two groups of
upper-class men and underclass men), aiming to unfold the student’s perception towards the
Microsoft office as compared to its other main competitors. One of the main benefit of this
tactic was that every participant can participate equally and can pitch in different ideas
spontaneously but it also has some limitations for an instance like one person can lead on the
whole conversation by not letting others to speak or to put forward their suggestions and
opinions.

RESULTS
Six participants with different majors and GPA’s were interviewed most of them agree that
Microsoft planet is a bit boring and the only feature they would like to try out is Microsoft office
and nothing else whereas they would love to explore overall google planet and they also came
up with the opinions that mostly apple people uses Microsoft office and the only company
which was advertising the most on the campuses was google by providing whiteboards and free
stuff to the students. Whereas, apple and Microsoft were lacking such advertising activities.

4. One-on-one In-depth interviews:

Face to face interviews will help analyzing the responses or results collected from the previously
used tactic (i.e. the diaries and the focus groups). It’s basically used to collect the additional data
but the major drawback of using this tactic was that respondent sometimes feel reluctant and
uncomfortable answering the questions.

RESULTS
The results drawn from these interview shows that Facebook, google.com and New York times
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are the only websites which are being used more often by the students. Word ,excel and
PowerPoint are the only features which scored the highest in terms of function usage and most
of the students like the Microsoft office for its standardization and functionalities but the worst
part was that the students found it difficult to use and couldn’t figure out most of its features
and requires high end learning curve.

STRATEGY
Microsoft Office being a well-known and reputable brand has failed to capture the maximum attention
of college students, which in turn is stolen by its giant competitor Google. As this is a technological era,
students are more inclined towards the use of technology in their daily lives, from communicating to
doing homework, to watching their favorite shows online. Microsoft Office, has been in the industry
from decades but unfortunately couldn’t cope up with changing modern era and demands of its target
audience. As a result, its facing competition in the market as consumers are switching to Google and
Facebook which are more cool. Hence Microsoft Office needs to come up with a strategy to sustain in
the market and engage its customers.
As seen by its competitors, and the results of market research, students are switching towards
Google for many other purposes that were not being fulfilled by Microsoft. Such as, reading online
books, working in projects online, research work, chatting with friends. Hence, Microsoft office as
switching from B2B TO B2C can bring following strategies:
 Need to bring some innovation in its existing product to meet the needs of tech users of this
era
 Microsoft Office can make itself more creative and easy to use for students as they are its
target audience. These students have a know-how of Microsoft Office but still not proficient
like business people who make special presentations and analyze data with the help of
Microsoft Excel. If Microsoft provides free exciting tutorials at the start they can catch the
attention of users which will lead to greater engagement in future.
 Microsoft can come up with its own search engine just like Google which students can
access to search anything online, from reading books to booking tickets to watching shows
online and doing research work. This can prove to be beneficial, as students can use it for
both work related and personal purposes
 As students spend maximum time online for checking emails, Microsoft can enhance the
layout of their emails and make itself differentiated from its competitors, they can also
provide a platform to its users where they can chat online and stay connected to Microsoft
Office even when its not work related.

ADVERTISING AND COMMUNICATION

For marketing its products to the students they should firstly for campus advertising, they should
provide students with the whiteboards in order to know how often they are using these features inside
and outside the campuses and could sponsored all the educational events by arranging their own
informational desks to help out the students. They can also provide educational institutions and
students with discounts and incentives to attract this younger lot. For online advertising, as the one-on-
one interviews help us identified that the most frequently used websites were cnn.com, New York times
and university official websites so there for Microsoft can use this as an opportunity by advertising on
the institutions official sites and also on educational site just as course era and SlideShare.