Zune: emergent brand or Trojan Horse?
Just because a brand is offered in consumer markets doesn’t necessarily make it a “consumer” brand. It all depends on the maker’s intent. The brand may carry an agenda at cross purposes to consumer interests.
If the ultimate intent is to move customers backward, what’s presented as a “brand” may not be a brand at all. It may be more of a Trojan Horse, with only a thin shell of brand trappings.
These issues of brand and brand agenda rise to the surface with Microsoft’s new Zune digital player. How they eventually work out can have long-term brand implications for Microsoft.
What is Zune’s brand agenda?
That’s a question I kept asking myself as I read initial reviews of Microsoft’s just-released Zune. I had already checked out the Zune site, and played with a Zune in a local store. In general, the reviews have a hard time getting excited about Zune, mostly because Zune doesn’t do that much for customers. In my view, Zune also offers much less brand value than expected. So much so, in fact, that it raises questions about its real intent in the marketplace. Zune is supposed to be an iPod killer, but first reports seem to agree that the Zune brand is a pretty weak customer platform.
Does the Zune brand depreciate customers?
The Zune brand raises this question because of Zune’s heavy DRM impositions and a download pricing scheme that’s complex, confusing and seemingly disadvantageous to customers. In both respects, Zune is a stunning step backward from the iPod. Grant McCracken covers a host of issues where Zune defies conventional marketing and usability logic. Daniel Eran has a more market-focused assessment. Toward the end of its long and detailed product review, Engadget concludes:
Microsoft really wanted to convince everybody that this time they’d changed, this time they were starting from the ground up, working for the consumer, working for the artist. Well, no one’s buying that story anymore.
So, what’s going on here? Has Microsoft designed the Zune brand to be a net negative for customers?
Microsoft’s challenge: raise the brand bar
I think reviewers are dismayed by what they don’t see in Zune, based on what they had expected Microsoft to deliver. (You can count me in this group.) The iPod set high product and brand standards, and created a billion-dollar digital player ecosystem and market. One would expect Microsoft to raise the brand bar, to try to trump the iPod in several key parameters. Above all, this is where Microsoft could unveil brand platforms and programs chock full of customer value, putting to rest the notion that Apple has an exclusive grip on top-tier digital brands.
Zune vs. iPod: battle of the brands
Indeed, Zune was expected to launch a brand battle royal. So we ask: Where is the Zune identity that frames a new customer identity? Where is the Zune brand strategy to create more potent customers, to deepen loyalty out of the box, to make music acquisition, sharing and playback easier, to redefine the context of mobile music so that the Zune experience becomes flat-out compelling? In other words, where is Microsoft’s brand strategy to do to Apple what Apple did to all the clunky MP3 brands way back in 2001?
Zune wimps out on brand value
Frankly, it’s hard to see any Zune brand strategy, or any noteworthy Zune brand proposition. It looks like Microsoft just wimped out on brand value, as if brand value didn’t really fit within the Redmond modus operandi. The world awaited a Zune brand splash. Instead, it got a Zune brand splat. Maybe Microsoft is simply brand averse, afraid of brands because brands empower customers. In certain respects, Zune throws the Microsoft brand into a backward-facing customer containment mode that no rational customer would willingly choose.
Is Zune’s real customer the big music labels?
Absent any forthcoming Zune brand initiatives, Zune does have the appearance of a Trojan horse, a brand in name only, not designed for customers at all. Rather than build momentum through customers, Zune seems intended to appeal to the major music labels, granting them enhanced control over online music distribution and a free hand to manipulate download pricing. These are two things the music studios crave as a means of regaining market power lost when they chose not embrace digital technology advances.
Sweetening the deal—at the top
In “sweetening the deal” for the labels in this fashion, including Microsoft payments to the labels for each Zune sold, Microsoft might hope to persuade the labels to eventually sign exclusive agreements making their music available only on Zune. This would help restore the labels to their former power and glory—at customer expense. And it could cut Apple, iTunes and the iPod out of the music business, right at the source.
In so doing, however, Zune would be rolling back the customer freedoms and the music revolution created by the iPod. That wouldn’t please customers—to put it mildly. Maybe this is why Zune takes such a low brand profile, skulking along in brown.
An “anti-brand” portent?
In a larger perspective, Zune’s hardball, “anti-brand” approach doesn’t portend well for Microsoft. Given its many Windows Live initiatives, the company needs customer allegiance more than ever. Value-rich brand programs are the best way to create it. Apple showed how to do this with the iPod. If Microsoft abandons a proven brand pathway with Zune, one wonders what strange forms of “brand” Microsoft will bring to market when it competes with Apple in the much larger home media center market, and with Google in the equally huge market for online apps.