Chris Capossela has a favourite quote from the late Elvis Presley: “If you take care of the fans, they will sure as hell take care of you.” Unlike The King, however, it’s not always easy for the CMO of Microsoft to find the fans in its particular kingdom.
Speaking at a VIP lecture hosted by the University of Texas McCombs School of Business that was uploaded on YouTube recently, Capossela said he and his team have decided, like many other companies, it’s becoming more important to listen to customers, particularly the segment that really love its products and services.
“We’ve tried to become surgical about it,” Capossela said, though getting his team on board wasn’t easy at first. “I had to convince them we actually had fans.”
Of course, there are many different ways to define a fan versus a more casual customer, so Capossela and his team have created their own. For starters, you need to count, target and talk to fans, while also understanding how to let them talk back. Fundamentally, Caposella said, fans demonstrate deep usage of a particular product, are advocates in the sense they were willing to talk well about the product on Microsoft’s behalf, and that their feelings are genuine and true.
Next, Capossela looks at fans by product rather than as a whole. A true fan of Bing, for instance, is conducting at least 100 queries a month on its search engine. Fans for the Windows 10 operating system are measured by daily active usage, while Skype is measured by video minutes and Xbox fans are measured by minutes spent playing games.
Once you get down to this level, Microsoft can start to correlate the economic power of its fans across different products. For example, Windows 10 fans do 52% more Bing queries than casual users. “Every query is a monetizable event,” he explained, adding that fans are not necessarily as siloed as you would think.
“A lot of people internally say, ‘Oh, Windows people are very different than Xbox people.’ Baloney. It’s nonsense,” he said. In fact, Windows fans spend 115% more minutes on Xbox and show a 75% higher lifetime revenue. “I could do this for any product at Microsoft.”
The nearly hour-long talk and Q&A with Capossela is worth watching in its entirety, particularly when he discusses what Microsoft is learning by studying other companies — such as Lego — outside of tech.
