Xbox’s marketing boss on why it has to be ‘tenacious’ to ‘fight for funds’
By being “scrappy” and avoiding the conventional, Xbox helped Bromley FC get promoted to the Football League for the first time in its 152-year history, while tripling the number of people who downloaded Football Manager 2024.
Despite being owned by one of the biggest businesses in the world, Xbox’s EMEA marketing boss says the brand needs to be “quite scrappy” when it comes to securing marketing investment.
“From a funding point of view, we need to work really hard against our competition,” says EMEA marketing director Michael Flatt.
Sony’s PlayStation is the brand’s biggest competitor in the console market, and “regrettably they outspend us”, Flatt says. “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.”
While Microsoft’s Xbox started life following the traditional console business model, a core element of its strategy now comes in its subscription service, Game Pass, which offers a wide selection of games to download across its Xbox consoles, PC and other platforms.
“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,” he tells Marketing Week.
But this scrappiness, coupled with a freedom to experiment, means the brand is able to come up with ideas that punch above their weight.
