BLUEOCEAN + MICROSOFT
The BlueOcean Microsoft Customer Story
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 Brand Navigator complements this approach with a high-frequency version based purely on external data to help marketers better adapt and respond.
Bringing speed to Brand-led decisions
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.
Keeping to the Rhythm of the Business
By late 2021, some Microsoft product marketing teams began to openly adopt BlueOcean scores directly into their target setting and OKRs. Brand Navigator 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 Brand Navigator 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 Brand Navigator 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 Brand Navigator to help enable a growth mindset with the insights they need to make faster brand-led decisions.
Interested in how Brand Navigator can help you?
FAQ
Still have questions?
Here are some top questions we often received. More questions–and answers–found here.
We use a proprietary mix of specific data points.
We are happy to share at a high-level our data and their sources. We generally use three types of data:
1. Brand Content
We collect marketing content from brands (website content, social content, digital ads, and more) and break it down thematically to analyze and determine consistency, uniqueness, affinity, alignment, and connection with audiences. Our sources include the brand’s content, Nielsen, SEMRush (for social channels like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube), advertising services such as adbeat, and our research and proprietary algorithms.
2. Business and Financial Content
We collect financial and business performance data such as revenue and sales data, website traffic, scale and availability, market capitalization, investment collection, etc. In addition, we have access to data sources from United States SEC, capital IQ, Crat.co, and Pitchbook to supplement our financial data. We also do financial modeling for private companies and for products nested within larger organizations.
3. Audience Content
We use automation to extract data from text, image, and video content from brands’ online audiences. Our sources include forums, reviews, and in some cases, key metrics from social media. In addition, we look at the sentiment and thematic summarization of this content and analyze it to determine consistency, uniqueness, affinity, alignment, and connection with the brand and its marketing. Sources here vary by industry, segment, and category. However, some specific sources are G2, Captera, Amazon, Yelp, App Store, Drizly, and more. We use findable, relevant review content as our primary audience signal, as they are intentional and less noisy than social media. Secondarily, we use social media metrics – specifically engagement metrics such as followers, reply rates over time, etc. versus audience-generated content on social channels.
Further, people ask how we know our data is accurate. Oftentimes, data acquired directly by BlueOcean from industry leading providers includes modeled or estimated numbers. These numbers reflect accepted standards for digital, media spend across many channels, financial and other metrics. While your own source data will always be the most accurate point of reference, our goal at BlueOcean is to bring visibility into data that you do not currently have or do not have the ability to bring together in a comprehensive way inside your organization. This data comes together into the BlueOcean framework, and provides insight into how your comprehensive marketing efforts support overall brand health. Further, we are one of the only sources where you can receive this type of holistic data on your competitors, as well.
Brand Navigator from BlueOcean accelerates time to value using a unique six-steps process.
Define – You don’t live in isolation, so defining your brand within its external environment and competitive sets are essential. We’ll work with you to identify your competitors and recommend the ones you should be comparing yourself to.
Sense – What is going on with your brand.
Currently, we assess brands by pulling data from over 1,200 data sources, and this list is still growing.
- Audience Signal
- Brand Content
- Business Analytics
Check out our FAQ on Data Transparency for a list of some of the data sources we use.
Understand – BlueOcean ingests data at scale. After that, it employs an automated ingestion process, fueled by machine learning and artificial intelligence, to analyze your brand, customers, and business data and organize them in a way that you can use them. This way, it helps you identify your brand’s strengths and weaknesses in relation to your competitors.
Prioritize – BlueOcean then distills the information into the Brand Navigator. This framework and its associated outputs present your brand’s key opportunities and weaknesses in clear language any business person can understand.
Execute – What good is information if you don’t know what to do with it? Brand Navigator will help you convert this information into actionable recommendations for your brand. If you need help executing these recommendations, we have a network of vetted partners who are familiar with Brand Navigator that can help your organization take action.
Reinforce – Lastly, Brand Navigator learns from its results and tracks its impact over time. By reinforcing learnings, it becomes more competent and makes better recommendations.
Yes! With Brand Navigator, we want you to feel like you have a seasoned strategist in your back pocket. Our brand intelligence platform helps us get data and insights at lightning speed. At the same time, our framework organizes, prioritizes, and refines the results into outputs that any business can use. However, we understand that sometimes you just want to talk to someone about the results you are seeing. So, as a subscriber to Brand Navigator, you can call our brand strategy team on the phone to ask questions about your data, discuss results, gain decision insights, and seek advice on the next line of action.
