One would think that a literal multi-trillion dollar company like Microsoft would have no issues with spending endless money on marketing a brand like Xbox in every corner of the world, but that hasn’t necessarily been the case. In Europe, for instance, PlayStation has historically been a much more dominant brand than Xbox, which is something that is reflected not only in the huge gulf in their sales, but also the gulf in their marketing budgets.
The latter, in fact, is something that Xbox’s EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) marketing lead Michael Flatt spoke about in a recent interview with Marketing Week as well (via Windows Central). As per Flatt, Xbox isn’t able to match the “significant” amounts money that PlayStation spends on marketing in Europe as a result of which the former has had to be “scrappy” in its marketing strategies.
“From a funding point of view, we need to work really hard against our competition,” Flatt said about PlayStation. “They’re blessed with marketing funds that we’re just not able to enjoy, but that’s totally fine. We adopt what I would call a more fiscally responsible approach to media investments. We’re not blessed with huge media budgets, so we have to be quite scrappy really, and quite tenacious to fight for funds that would probably go somewhere else.”
Interestingly, a recent report claimed that Microsoft was looking to pull back its marketing efforts for Xbox in certain EMEA markets even further, thanks in large part to historically low sales in those regions. The company will allegedly shift marketing focus to Game Pass, PC and cloud gaming, and Xbox controllers. Read more on that through here.
