It has been six months since Microsoft launched its new Windows Vista OS and Office 2007 productivity suite, but with its new Smart Campaign the software vendor hopes to keep the momentum going in its Canadian partner community.
The company has had a number of promos and other programs around Office and Vista to support the channel since the January launch of the applications said Patti Ann Marzocco, vice-president of the OEM Group with Microsoft Canada.
The latest, launched this month, is the Smart Campaign, which aims to help system builders with some promos to entice their customers to the Microsoft platform. Microsoft will supply system builders with scratch cards to pass on to their customers for the chance to win a host of prizes.
“The idea is for the system builders to have something they can connect their customers to,” said Marzocco.
The grand prize is a compact, fuel efficient smart car of the sort that Marzocco said are all the rage in Europe. And the great thing, she said, is that the system builder that sells the winner will also get their own smart car.
Not every card is a winner, but Marzocco said it is a very rich program with high odds of winning at least something. Among the secondary prizes are 8000 Tim Horton’s gift cards, 5000 Petro Canada Cards, 1500 Ciniplex movie cards, and hundreds of mobile devices, cameras and GPS systems.
The lead product for the promotion is Office 2007, with customers getting one scratch card when they purchase it preinstalled. Customers can get additional scratch cards for purchasing Vista and/or Windows Server at the same time.
While Microsoft typically focuses directly on partners with its promos, Marzocco said it wanted to try something a little different with this program.
“We wanted to try giving them something that was more customer-focused and consumer-focused as a way to help them to increase demand for their business,” she said.
The promo launched this month and runs through the end of November, with the smart car winner to be announced by Christmas. Marzocco said a lot of partners can experience a slowdown in the summer months, and the hope is the Smart Campaign will help them generate some excitement and awareness as they gear-up for back to school.
“Back to school really starts by mid-August, so we thought if we got this out there now it would give them something to advertise, create some excitement and carry them through the back to school and back to business time period,” said Marzocco. “This is a pretty rich program so we wanted to make sure there was ample runway for partners to really maximize the excitement and the impact.”
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