Stefan Lacher & Florian Roth 
Business Report Microsoft Xbox. Marketing concept and strategy [PDF ebook] 

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject Business economics – Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: High Distinction, Deakin University (Faculty of Business and Law), course: Marketing Management, language: English, abstract: By launching the game console Xbox, Microsoft did not only introduce a new
product but stepped into a totally new market where there company did not have any
experience yet. Although they had a huge marketing budget, they focused on
spending it as effective as possible. Therefore Microsoft’s marketing team had to find
out, who their target customers are and with what marketing strategy they could reach
their challenging goal to become leader in the game console market. But has their
way of segmenting the market and choosing a marketing mix for the Xbox really been
successful? The Marketing concept consists of three principles that hold that achieving
organizational objectives require determining needs and wants of targets markets and
delivering the desired satisfactions more effectively and efficiently than competitors
do (Hoffman et al 2003, pp.10-11). Microsoft took advantage of all three principles. Microsoft did put enormous effort
in identifying potential customers’ needs. The research was concentrated on so called
“hardcore gamers” who spend more than 25 hours playing a week. This group was
seen as early adopters as well as opinion-leaders. Of high importance were an
appealing design to young customers and performance like speed of the console and
high quality of audio and graphics. […]