BLUEOCEAN + MICROSOFT
In a world of a thousand choices and millions of data points, it’s hard to conjure a clear picture of where a brand stands amidst competitors in the market. When competitors’ activities shift and audience brand perceptions follow, traditional survey-based methodologies have been the gold standard for insights.
BlueOcean complements this approach with a high-frequency version based purely on external data to help marketers better adapt and respond.
In 2019, Microsoft’s Cloud Marketing team came to BlueOcean looking for a way to augment their survey-based annual brand tracker (ABTS). They needed a tool that could help the entire business better understand how their product brands stacked up against competitors and what actions they should be taking to drive growth.
We wanted the ability to track key items in nearly real time, and provide quick data and insights to fuel better, brand-led decision making across the business. BlueOcean, with the power of their AI based platform, provided what we needed, and in a way that exceeded our expectations for a price that was well below comparative options.
What began as a proof-of-concept for a single brand has now evolved to cover a multitude of brands and products across the Microsoft business to provide insights that help focus strategy and action where it matters most. For example, in the Microsoft Security and Microsoft Teams divisions, product marketers started using BlueOcean to inform their go-to-market strategy and positioning. And specialist roles like social media managers and content strategists began using BlueOcean as a common reference to provide competitive context to their strategies.
By late 2021, some Microsoft product marketing teams began to openly adopt BlueOcean scores directly into their target setting and OKRs. It provided another standard of reference for brand health and development of their product marketing strategy. It meant that for the first time, a single source of data, updated in near real-time, was available to guide critical day-to-day decisions.
As an example, Microsoft Dynamics 365 began to employ BlueOcean as a means to measure success in moving critical scores versus the competition. It has now become a central point of reference in the onboarding process for a growing set of product marketers to focus and accelerate their actions in a more agile way.
BlueOcean provides a critical tool for the Dynamics 365 team in gaining real-time insights to help focus my teams on the most impactful next actions. We set out to inspire curiosity to drive our work forward. Beyond these insights, there is something truly inspiring when we can see evidence of the effectiveness of our actions. It makes me fall in love again with our work.
For these teams, BlueOcean has not only become a way to connect their actions to the product strategy, but also a link into the broader business strategy for the entire product suite. The platform gives the team a common lens to focus and better collaborate.
A brand product portfolio view produced for the leadership team means the same uncompromised view of their performance against the competition is elevated to all stakeholders; one team empowered to make strategic decisions from data via the same lens.
BlueOcean has the potential to transform how we go to market. We are starting to use data to measure our brand health in real time and drive action through more timely and effective decisions. For the first time, we have the data to answer the hard questions coming from leadership. BlueOcean presents an enormous advantage for B2B companies in general where brand has traditionally taken a back seat to more tactical, rational sales-led strategy. BlueOcean’s proprietary framework simplifies a very complex, long-term view designed around proven principles of growth. It helps marketers build the case for additional, sustained marketing investment. It brings data with a broader competitive context to media planning and buying. It yields critical insights to establish content strategy starting points. Above all, it gives us the confidence to act and do more.
BlueOcean’s partnership with Microsoft continues to expand as more stakeholders see how their teams can use the platform to help enable a growth mindset with the insights they need to make faster brand-led decisions.
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