Marketing

1. Problem Statement: Effectively identifies and describes the management problem or opportunity the case protagonist faces.

In case of Microsoft Office, they were behind in the game of developing a digital marketing strategy for college students. As mentioned in the article Google and Facebook had aggressively approached the student community by promoting their products by campus interactions and freebies and collecting student information (customer requirement for why they choose their services). Google was actively involved by giving away Google apps for education, also piloted Google 101 class for computer science students and planned to extend their service to many more universities.

Google also gave their email services to universities and showing them of how they could save on their estimated school cost of US $5-6 million to develop an email system internally. On the other hand Facebook gave students to social network capabilities to keep in touch with their friends and families and share their lives.

Microsoft products were mostly used by students to basically tackle their day to day school work by using Microsoft office products. They lack to create value for themselves as what Google and Facebook did by going to campuses and learning about their customer by offering variety of free services and ideas to satisfy their needs.

2. Available Alternatives

(a) Identifies reasonable and potentially-viable alternative courses of action (including alternatives not suggested in the case, when appropriate).

The potential viable alternative course of action for Microsoft would be look into their competitors on what value they are creating to satisfy customer needs and chase them. So the alternative would be to collaborate with Facebook, which is big in social media and start to advertise their products. Create a simple survey to collect students information on what they look into in future for their products by giving away them free copy of just Microsoft...