It shows a mother who's having a problem composing a family photograph. To cut and paste different images into the photo, a la Photoshop, she appeals for help "to the cloud."
Huh?
You know the story of the blind men, each touching a different part of an elephant. One touches the leg and insists it's a tree. Another one touches the tail and claims it's a rope. A third one touches the elephant's trunk and is convinced it's a snake, and so on.
If we added the woman from the Microsoft "cloud" ad into this story, she'd be touching a discarded peanut shell that the elephant dropped a long way back on the trail. In other words, not even close.
It's sometimes difficult to explain SaaS and the cloud. One of the challenges confronting SaaS marketers is to educate all the buyers in the decision making process about this new mode of computing. Education is essential to winning the prospective customer's trust, and winning their trust is essential to winning their business.
In this effort to educate prospective buyers, the Microsoft "to the cloud"/photo-editing/discarded peanut shell TV ad doesn't really help. Sorry.
"It's bigger than the application"
A different ad running on television is actually more helpful to SaaS marketers... and it doesn't involve SaaS, the cloud, or even technology. It's from Starbucks.
The ad shows the process of creating a single cup of coffee for an individual customer, all the way from the plantation to the cup labeled with the customer's name, "Sue."
It closes with the tag-line: "You and Starbucks: It's bigger than coffee."
The message here: Starbucks is not just about the coffee. It's about the entire experience. They're marketing a relationship with the customer that goes beyond the product. In fact, they've even gone so far as to remove the word "coffee" from their logo.
That's a useful lesson for SaaS marketers. When it's done well, SaaS is marketed as more than just the application. It's about the entire customer experience: it's easy to purchase and deploy, simple to use, and painless to upgrade and maintain.
In addition to the features and functions, SaaS is about a commitment to deliver an increasingly useful solution reliably and securely over the life of the subscription.
It's bigger than the application.
This work by Peter Cohen, SaaS Marketing Strategy Advisors is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
