2021 Red Marketing Strategy: Zoom Video Communications, Inc.

, San Jose, CA

Collett, E; Godza, T; Kreidler, L; Mallory, A; Nagel, B; Slivka, S; Szafraniec, J; Zamora-

Madrid, N
MKTG 290: Marketing
Dr. Vincent van Empeh
November 23, 2020
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Executive Summary
Zoom Communications, Inc.’s mission is to make video conferencing easy to access and
secure so that users can have a positive experience while using our software and accomplish
more. Zoom strives to deliver happiness and make communications convenient for everyone,
whether the user is a student, teacher, employee, manager, or a friend looking to converse via
audio and visuals. There are many competitors that offer alternative products but Zoom stands
out due to ease of use and inexpensiveness. The purpose of this document is for the Red team of
the Fall 2020 Marketing class to explain the marketing circumstances for Zoom Video
Communications, Inc. The following will inform readers about the recent growth that has
allowed Zoom to become a successful and very well-known company, and their future
opportunities that will allow them to keep expanding their market share.
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Introduction
Zoom Video Communications, Inc. was founded in 2011 by current CEO Eric Yuan. He
was previously the Vice President of Engineering of WebEx, another web and video
conferencing application that is a current competitor of Zoom (Belyh, 2020). Zoom’s clear
mission statement and culture has allowed it to steadily grow out of a saturated market to become
a dominant leader in video conferencing which has become as important as ever due to a more
virtual lifestyle brought by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Zoom makes their mission, vision, values, and culture clear on their website. Their
mission is to make telecommunications safe and secure. Although they have had controversies
over the depth of their security before, that has not stopped them from being used by hundreds of
millions of people every day. Zoom’s vision is to empower people to accomplish more through
video communications, something that Zoom has achieved over the past few months especially.
Their main value trait is care, listing off community, customers, company, teammates, and selves
as how they want to promote that. They list their company culture as delivering happiness,
which they allude to throughout their website, including claiming to be number one in happiness
(Zoom Communications, 2020).
Zoom is headquartered in San Jose, California, although it has many office locations
across the United States and China, with one office located in the Netherlands, the United
Kingdom, France, India, Singapore, and Japan, as detailed by their website. There are 2,532
employees working across these locations, or perhaps by home using their software; 1,396 of
these are employed in the United States. Zoom first launched software in 2013 and reached a $1
billion valuation in 2017. It was not until 2019 until the company became profitable and
released its initial public offering on NASDAQ. With the help of the added use because of the
coronavirus, Zoom has now grown to be worth around $35 million. Because of this new long-
term environment, Zoom has even more room to grow, too (Zoom Communications, 2020).
The following marketing report will dive into everything that anyone would ever need to
know about Zoom Video Communications, Inc.’s marketing department, including the product,
price, place, and promotion variables of marketing. The general marketing environment, the
target market, and a brief example of an advertisement campaign is also included. Zoom must
continue to embrace their customers and build on their secure, easy to use interface to grow their
market share using all the aspects of their marketing strategy detailed in the following pages.
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General Marketing Environment

Life has changed tremendously over the past few months. The global COVID-19
pandemic has opened the doors for many new companies to market new products to meet the
needs of people who need to conduct their lives in a new manner. This is the case for Zoom
Video Communications, Inc., a company that has been around for nearly ten years. It was not
until school and work especially have gone virtual, however, that many people started hearing
about it. Governments are forcing employees to work from home, learn from home, and stay out
of large social gatherings. These policies have created a virtual society where everyone is
expected to work, educate, and socialize from their homes as best as they can. Zoom, along with
its competitors, have seen a huge increase in usage in the past year because of this, allowing for
the general market environment to open opportunities for huge growth.
Socially, logging onto Zoom and/or their competitors has been a daily occurrence for
most students, employees, or anyone else looking for a safe virtual interaction amidst the
pandemic. Spending hours on end in meetings on a video conferencing platform has led to a
serious drain on mental health for some, which is something that companies should probably
start to combat in some capacity. When we are not physically present, it can be “a physically,
cognitively, and emotionally taxing experience for many users,” according to L. M. Sacasas of
The Convivial Society (2020). One way for brands to expand their market share in this general
environment is to develop a marketing strategy in fighting against “Zoom fatigue”, which may
be seen in the future.
Zoom Video Communications, Inc. is not the first business of its kind; Business Matters
tells of the history of video conferencing. Telecommunication in the most basic forms have been
marketed since the 1830’s, while the virtual face-to-face component has been imagined since the
1880’s. Technology was far behind the idea at this point. The AT&T Company was the first big
influence and marketer on these ideas and were first able to send still pictures between telephone
wires in the 1930’s. Eventually, in 1994, the first webcam was brought to the market,
revolutionizing this industry. Skype popularized the use of webcams for video conferencing and
dominated the market in the 21st century. Zoom is available across Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS,
Android, and Blackberry. Broadband internet technology is also a necessity for companies to
allow their staff to use the video conferencing technology, which became widespread and
affordable in 2004. Now that webcams are a part of almost all laptops, tablets, and phones, and
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companies have adequate bandwidth, technology is no problem for Zoom and its competitors
(Business Matters, 2015).
Skype has not been the only competitor on the market up until the past year by any
means, though. Alternatives to Zoom software include Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Cisco
WebEx, LogMeIn, GoToMeeting, BlueJeans, Join.me, Arkadin, TeamViewer, Fuze, and
Whereby. Currently, 62% of companies use three or more of these video calling platforms,
according to Katherine Stone of GetVoIP.com. Zoom was the most popular with over 300
million meeting participants per day in the past few months. Using these products allegedly
saves $11,000 per year per employee, with an average of a few thousand dollars saved by the
employee in commuting expenses (Stone, 2020). Workers are more efficient, loyal, and satisfied
with working from home, so it is a smart tool for companies to implement.
The future of video conferencing applications is very bright. GetVoIP.com states that
“Though Coronavirus certainly accelerated the future of video communication… the majority of
businesses were already using these tools.” The market share of video conferencing is expected
to grow to $50 billion by 2026, from $14 billion in 2019, so it is as important as ever for Zoom
and its competitors to market their products properly to gain as much of this valuable market
share as possible (Stone, 2020).
Outside of this specific marketing environment, the overall economics of this year of the
pandemic and market recession has changed marketing processes for all businesses. Kasey
Panetta of Gartner explains global factors that are starting to shape this decade’s marketing
environment. In person interactions are limited so technology is important as ever for companies
to embrace in marketing their products. Consumers have a large mistrust in companies and
products. Because in person companies have been halted, there is a low productivity in some
industries. There are many concerns about the environment, and it is as important as ever for
companies to be environmentally conscious as global warming worsens. There is a shortage of
talent, but that has not stopped technological advancements that allows for a lesser need of talent
(Panetta, 2020).
With everything being virtual, companies must be sure that the products they are
marketing are secure. Zoom dedicates a page on their website to privacy and legal, outlining all
the privacy regulations Zoom is compliant with, how they use cookies, their privacy practices,
and how they process data (2020). Millions of people put their trust in Zoom every day and
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Zoom does not take this trust lightly. Trust-based marketing is a point to highlight. Although
BBC News said is fine for keeping in touch for most people, it is “unsuitable for government
secrets.” They explain a report from Citizen Lab in which it warned against healthcare providers
handling sensitive patient information, activists, lawyers, and journalists working on sensitive
topics, and governments or businesses worried about espionage using the software (Molloy &
Tidy, 2020). However, Bloomberg reports that Zoom has boosted their security since then
(Brody & Grant, 2020).
Overall, the current general marketing environment is one that is unprecedented, yet
ideal for a company like Zoom. The company has gained an upper edge on its competitors in a
society where video communication is growing at a rapid rate and used every day by hundreds of
millions of people. As the market share of this sector of the economy continues to grow,
marketing teams must be resilient in their work to gain the upper hand on their competitors and
deliver the best product possible to their customers.

Target Market Characteristics

Since the pandemic hit, Zoom has become an essential tool for businesses and educators
everywhere, but Zoom’s target market stayed largely the same since inception. Zoom primarily
targets businesses of all kinds, along with educational settings. In an interview with Martin
Luenendonk of Cleverism, Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan explains that the company
“target[s] business customers, SMB (Server Message Block) and large enterprise” along with
“education customers as well as healthcare customers like telemedicine. [and] telehealth” (2016).
The psychological characteristics of Zoom’s target market include being proactive.
Zoom targets people and businesses who respond to challenges quickly, efficiently, and
intelligently, and using the software helps them do so with its easy-to-use and innovative product
design. Mher Darbinyan explains in an article for The Social Grabber that Zoom’s target market
consists of people who are “open-minded, ambitious, and intelligent people who never cease to
seek for new opportunities and more of what they have.” Darbinyan goes on to explain that this
group of people tend to feel a strong sense of responsibility. Zoom also targets people and
businesses that “are concerned about social, economic, and political issues” which is more
relevant than ever in the pandemic (2020). Zoom’s website shows these values they hold, which
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reflect the values of their target market. Other values include community, empowerment, and
care, which reinforces their proactive nature.
HG Insights has data on 11,261 companies that currently use products from Zoom Video
Communications, Inc. Over a third of these companies fall within the range of earning $1 to $10
million in revenue, while over a quarter earn $10 to 50 million in revenue. An overwhelming
majority of the companies are in the software development and manufacturing industries, but the
product is used by a wide variety of companies, notably those in the education and health care
industries. Zoom is also utilized by companies with varying sizes based on number of
employees. Geographically, the product is used frequently in states all over the U.S., and in
many countries around the globe. The target market appears to disregard the geography of its
consumers within the U.S., but its consumer base shrinks dramatically internationally. Over the
past year, Zoom’s consumer base has expanded by 77%. This is due to the COVID-19 pandemic
which has forced many companies to begin working remotely, creating the perfect opportunity
for Zoom to grow.
Zoom’s Head of Sales Greg Holmes told Freshsales’s Nivas Ravichandran in an
interview that Zoom’s ideal customer is “frankly, everyone” (2018). Holmes also said that Zoom
focuses on targeting the IT industry, which is reflected in the previously mentioned data from
HG Insights. Zoom has multiple teams internally, each focused on a different segment of the
target market. This is a differentiated targeting strategy that allows the company to connect
directly with each segment. Zoom has seen success with early adopters in the tech industry, as
according to Holmes, these companies “want to be the first to try out a technology that’s new and
making the news” (Ravichandran, 2018).
Overall, Zoom’s target market is very broad, with various segments targeting businesses
and basic consumers. Their target market has remained relatively constant despite massive
expansion. Most of their business customers are in the software and education industries, but
their products are used by many companies across all industries.

Product Variable
Zoom Technologies, Inc. is a cloud-based enterprise that hosts virtual video and audio
conferences, webinars, and meetings. Founder Eric Yuan was inspired to create an easy to use
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virtual conferencing system while in a long-distance relationship with his girlfriend. Yuan is no
stranger to telecommunications with his background at Cisco.
Yuan’s background at a competing company is interesting. “Zoom’s creators also made a
point of avoiding false distinctions in teleconferencing. As Oded Gal, chief product officer at
Zoom, tells the story, both he and Yuan were frustrated working on the platform under Cisco.
The platform was split. You needed one app for group conferencing calls in boardrooms, and
another for individuals chatting one on one” (Wilson, 2020). Zoom is extremely useful since it
has multifunctionality. Users can video conference, record, chat, hold polls, share a screen, and
more, all from one application. It is designed for both consumer and corporate clientele.
Zoom offers four product lines: Meetings & Chat, Rooms & Workspaces, Phone
Systems, and Video Webinars. Meetings and Chats are offered at basic, pro, business, and
enterprise subscription levels. Basic is free for up to 40 minutes and is targeted towards people
who want to have short, personal meetings. Pro is advertised to small teams that want to host up
to 100 participants. The business subscription costs $199.90 per year per license with a
minimum of 10 licenses. This plan is tailored for small to medium sized businesses and can host
up to 300 participants. It also includes other benefits like single sign-on and cloud recording
transcripts. The Enterprise subscription is for large companies requiring over 100 licenses at the
same price of $199.90 per year per license. This plan allows clients to host 500 to 1,000
participants and gives customers unlimited cloud storage and a dedicated customer success
manager.
Zoom Rooms optimizes the conference room experience by making it easier to schedule
and host conference calls. Customers can use their own hardware if it is already compatible or
purchase items from recommended partners. One click meetings, whiteboard integration, and
three monitor displays are just some of the features listed. This product is created for businesses
that want to collaborate virtually and physically. Zoom Phone is an optional add on for Zoom
Meetings. It provides users with HD Audio, the ability to use automatic call routing wizards,
and the ability to call over Wi-Fi or cellular connections. It also allows corporations to port
numbers to Zoom to streamline their telephone management. Zoom Video Webinars are
designed for engagement with large audiences. It has features like questions and answers dialog
boxes, polling, private and group panelist chat settings, virtual hand raising, reporting, and
analytics.
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Although video conferencing is not a new concept, Zoom created a product that truly
differed from competitors. The interface is simple. It does not require a login or password to join
a meeting and links can be shared through email or text. This differs from competitors like
Google Hangout and Skype, which require an account. Customers can also participate in a
Zoom call from any device, whether it is a laptop, Android phone, or iPad. “Its lightweight web
client could figure out almost instantly what kind of device you were using, meaning Zoom
didn’t need different versions for Mac or PC. It also provided a software layer that shielded any
bugs that might be introduced when a browser like Chrome, Firefox or Safari pushed an update.
Zoom could operate even at 40% data loss, so it would still work on a spotty or slow internet
connection” (Konrad, 2019). With the COVID-19 pandemic and large increase in people
working from home, Zoom has become an invaluable tool for productivity.
The largest clients for zoom include large corporations and school districts to continue
face-to-face communication with employees, clients, students, and teachers. The platform’s
security features which include requiring a password to enter or a host to give permission to
admit an attendee into a session reiterates the company’s efforts to keep clients’ information
private and secure. Zoom clients also have the option to have an organization specific zoom
platform which can limit access to individuals signed in to a work/school email and give
permission to specific groups to use certain features without the permission of the host. For
example, a company holding a conference can give permission to mute, unmute, share screen,
and share video to employees while all other attendees would be in view only mode until they
are given permission to share after raising their hand. Only then will they be given a window to
unmute, share video, or share their screen. Most of these changes and features occurred after
Zoom received backlash for its lack of security from users and the Federal Trade Commission
(Pride & Ferrell, 2020; Brody & Grant, 2020).

Price Variable
Due to the recent changes in our world many students, teachers, and even companies
have relied on Zoom to keep in contact with each other and allow people to affordably
communicate without meeting physically. Zoom has led the pack in reasonably priced video
communication tools during the pandemic and it has been the “go to” for people around the
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world. This can potentially be attributed to Zoom’s prices and marketing skills. Most users of
Zoom have used the free version to go to class or meet with professors however, there are a lot of
big companies and corporations that use Zoom for their everyday work lives. For this, Zoom
offers a wide variety of packages that customers can buy if they are trying to connect with a lot
of people within their company or group.
As stated previously, there is a free or “Basic” version of Zoom that anyone can acquire
and allows to host up to 100 participants but are limited to 40-minute group meetings. The next
tier you can purchase is called “Pro”, which is great for small teams. This will cost $149.90 a
year and can host 100 participants. There is a 30-hour time limit for group meetings but allows
for social media streaming. The following tier that can be purchased is called “Business” and
would be useful for owners of a small business or company where more people need to be
communicated with. This version sells for $199.90 a year and can host up to 300 participants
and do everything that the “Pro” version allows. The last tier of this branch of products is called
“Enterprise”. This is for the large enterprises that consist of hundreds of thousands of people.
This version sells for $199.90 a year and it can host up to 1,000 participants, giving unlimited
cloud storage and including everything the previous tier offers.
Zoom Rooms is the company’s most expensive product, coming in at $49 per month per
room, or $499.00 each when billed annually. The price of the Zoom Phone add-on ranges
between $180-$240 per user per year, depending on the need for global calling capabilities.
Zoom Video Webinars have pricing based on the number of attendees. The least expensive
option being $400 per year per license for up to 100 attendees. For up to 1,000 attendees, it is
$3400 per year per license, with up to 10,000 attendees costing $64,900 per year per license.
Zoom offers the ability to host webinars for up to 50,000 attendees but requires contacting sales
to receive the price (Zoom Conferencing, 2020).
Zoom offers a lot of choices for consumers to choose from depending on what they need.
A starting up business will not buy an enterprise package because they do not need to host that
many people, so Zoom does a good job making different packages available for people’s
different needs, wants, and budgets. Since the global pandemic has taken people out of their
work environments to their own homes, Zoom’s basic plan has been downloaded by a lot of
people. By making it free to use on iPhones since March 18, they have gotten millions of
downloads and a lot of revenue (Evans, 2020). This strategy by Zoom allows for more people to
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see and use the product and get their product's name out there even though they are not getting
any immediate revenue. The revenue that they get is from people purchasing their bigger
memberships. By offering the free or basic version of Zoom to everyone, it has put Zoom’s name
at the top of the list of video communication software, in turn making bigger companies or
organizations want to buy the most popular software or the software that they have used before.
One of Zoom’s biggest competitors, Cisco WebEx, has very similar plans for customers
to purchase. Just like Zoom, Cisco offers a free version for everyone to use and you can host
with one person. The difference between the two is that Cisco’s starter plan costs up to $162 a
year and can only hold up to nine hosts, whereas Zoom’s “Pro” pack is only $149.90 a year and
can hold up to 100 hosts (Cisco WebEx, 2020). The same pattern occurs in every other tier of
Cisco’s plans where it is more expensive and holds less hosts than Zoom. Not only that, but they
also limit their meeting length times. With a subscription from Zoom, a meeting can last up to
30 hours while in a Cisco subscription a meeting can only last 24 hours. Zoom offers better
prices for their products while also giving them more participant capacity and longer meeting
times. This could be one of the main reasons as to why Zoom has been the best in video
communications software because it offers competitive prices that people want to purchase over
their competitors.
Zoom’s shares are up 74% this year while the S&P 500 is down 21% in the biggest sell-
off since the financial crisis of 2008 (Novet, 2020). The pandemic has really allowed this
company to grow because people needed an alternate way to meet other than in person. Investors
figured this out relatively quickly and started to buy more stocks of Zoom for how well it was
doing. The incremental spike in users could make Zoom as much as $140 million in incremental
revenue if customers that convert to a paid plan are retained for at least a year. As stated
previously, Zoom does not make any money off the most popular free subscription that they
offer. Zoom is doing a good job getting customers to buy the paid plans after they have
purchased the free plan, pushing towards that $140 million revenue boost.

Place Variable
Zoom has only one headquarters in San Jose, California along with ten physical locations
spanning seven countries in Denver, Santa Barbara, Kansas City, Atlanta, Sydney, London,
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Paris, Amsterdam, and Mumbai. They also have one remote location in Tokyo. Zoom’s
products can be available to anyone with internet connection. There are no physical Zoom
stores, as there is no tangible Zoom product. The company uses the software-as-a-service
business model due to this lack of a physical product.
In January of 2018, Zoom announced that they went into a distribution agreement with
Ingram-Micro. The distribution agreement will benefit Zoom in many ways for example it can
help expand and integrate Zoom to more users and to multiple companies and schools across the
globe. The Zoom application is conveniently available to most operating systems and mobile
devices making it accessible virtually anywhere across the world. Most distribution costs occur
when adding the platform to third party providers such as Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play
Store, where a percentage of sales goes to the service provider. As of now, the application is still
free to download and install, making it easy to connect with people after downloading and
creating an account. Zoom can be found downloaded on laptops, tablets, and smartphones in
many homes across the globe.

Promotion Variable
The huge increase in popularity and usage has made the promotion of Zoom easy for
their marketing department. In an interview with Campaign Live, Zoom marketing director Jane
Pelosi stated that “brand awareness hasn’t been a problem for Zoom since COVID-19 hit”
(Bradley, 2020). Zoom has become a household brand name. The company has grown
tremendously, and because of that, marketing no longer sets promotional goals by the quarter or
month, but by the hour or day. They get plenty of advertising for free due to how universally it
is used by people of all professions. This spring, for example, actor John Krasinski started a
YouTube news show titled “Some Good News” where he shared positive stories that are
happening amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. One of such episodes included a reunion of the cast
of The Office participating in a wedding of superfans over a Zoom meeting. This video went
viral and has garnered nearly 15 million views hitherto (France, 2020). Krasinski would go on to
host many other celebrities over Zoom, including a virtual prom night. There are plenty of
videos like this on the internet, which Zoom is perfectly fine with.
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Marketing director Jane Pelosi has also stated that she does not “need to spend as much
time making sure people understand what Zoom is; it’s officially a verb at this point” (Bradley,
2020). Most people in the US know all about the company thanks to its 300 million users.
Before the pandemic though, the situation was different. Promotion of their products was
focused on businesses; now, it is focused on threading everyone together in a much wider variety
of ways. Zoom’s promotion is focused on how it is mostly free and easy to use. This model is
known as “freemium,” according to John Battelle of Medium.com (2020). Zoom offers the basic
version for free with more features for a monthly subscription, as previously mentioned. The
service that they provide is the software itself. Battelle says although it is easy to install and
share, it is also easy to hack. There were many claims like this at the start of the pandemic, but
since then, Zoom has been promoting security and has even dedicated a part of their website to
how they do so. Pelosi is on record stating that “we [Zoom] know the immense responsibility we
have,” so they certainly are not taking security lightly (Bradley, 2020). Digital content on their
website features many videos on how to use the software to its fullest potential.
The company has also put its name out there by sponsoring different events.
SponsorPitch shows that recently, Zoom has been a presenting sponsor of the ONE
Championship, which is Asia’s largest sports media property that showcases mixed martial arts
athletes, along with the US Open Tennis Championships (2020). Zoom Communications has
also partnered with virtual events, such as the “Your Life in Focus: A Vision Forward” event led
by Oprah Winfrey and WW, formerly more known as Weight Watchers. The company has also
partnered with Dove, known for their personal care and beauty products, to extend the 40-minute
time limit over Mother’s Day Weekend (Bradley, 2020). Zoom is now promoting their product
over Thanksgiving weekend by again extending this limit, although there is no other company
associated with it this time. This is great public relations for the company, as they are a brand
that is a safe alternative to group social gathering in the coronavirus pandemic. There is no
doubt that Zoom has also been an integral part of many other events, but their public relations
does not stop there. Their website includes a page dedicated to press releases, publicizing all the
awards, honors, events, and big news of the company. Every day or two it seems like Zoom has
positive news about them, so it is important for them to keep signifying their successes.
Zoom has a strong presence on social media, with verified accounts on Instagram,
Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. On Instagram, they have 68,300 followers and post around
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two to four times a week. They began this account in the spring of 2018 to a very limited
audience, but they reach a much larger audience now. Zoom’s Facebook account has a
community of over 435,000 followers and nearly 400,000 likes as of November 22, 2020.
YouTube is another social media that Zoom uses with 295,000 subscribers. They use this
account very effectively to promote their product by posting dozens of help videos in lots of
different languages to reach as large of an audience as possible. They have accumulated over 93
million views from these videos since inception in 2012. Their Twitter account, with the handle
@zoom_us, has their largest following with one million followers. This account was made in
March of 2012 and has tweeted over 25,000 times since then. They use their account to their
advantage in promoting their product very effectively; they quote tweets on how other
companies and people are using their product creatively and take suggestions from other Twitter
users. Zoom also uses this account as a support tool, promoting their helpfulness and other
intangible benefits. Finally, Zoom additionally has a blog as a part of their website used to
promote their brand. They use this to answer questions and how to work the easy-to-use
software, promoting their product, its usability, and its support (Bradley, 2020).

Advertising Campaign
Zoom entered an extremely crowded market but was still able to succeed. The marketing
team often refers to their customer-driven DNA, when asked about their success, which helped
them create the best product on the market. To some extent the product can sell itself, as large
video conferences, especially during the ongoing pandemic, automatically introduced many
people into using Zoom.
Still, long before the company gained global attention, Zoom was partnering up with
other business-to-business companies. Asana, Calendly, and Slack are just a few of the biggest
systems many companies nowadays use to make their workflow more efficiently, into all which
Zoom is directly integrated. This turned out to be a consistent growth strategy that worked well
for Zoom in the past and will continue to help them separate themselves from their competitors
as there is no space for more than one video service integrated into these platforms. Although
the advertisement shown in our presentation suits the category of product advertising, Zoom is
using almost all their marketing budget on institutional advertising. To be precise, they show the
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company’s logo on billboards all over the United States. This was the most effective advertising
since the beginning of the company, according to Eric Yuan, and they will continue to invest into
billboards similar to those seen in the most recent NBA games in the “bubble” setting.
The appendix at the end of this document includes a link to an existing 45 second
advertisement from Zoom that showcases the company’s products. One concern from buyers,
especially for those who may not be as familiar with technology, might be how difficult their
product would be to use. This quick video explains how easy it is to connect multiple conference
rooms or meet with attendees from desktop or mobile devices, being “as simple as a single
touch” (Zoom YouTube, 2020). The video reassures the simplicity of joining meetings in a few
different ways, which tells its concerned consumers that they have nothing to worry about. This
video is just one of many similar help videos and advertisements that Zoom has posted on their
YouTube channel.

Conclusion
Based on the company’s current trajectory, it seems to have a healthy share of the market
in the video communications space due to the circumstances of the pandemic. Before the
pandemic, Skype had a major hold on the market and has not been able to create a lot of traction
ever since. Zoom’s popularity over the Internet has created a strong customer base as it was
deemed the main source of communication between small groups, companies, and schools. Its
versatility of being the platform where a family can reunite or where a company can have
important client meetings from anywhere in the world demonstrates its almost perfect product
market fit for the new age of technology where convenience creates value.
Going forward, the company can expect a strong base larger than the approximately two
million users it served before the pandemic, although it may not be as high as its peak when the
entire world was on lockdown orders in March. More companies have seen the value in having
virtual face-to-face interactions due to reduced travel and lodging costs and will continue to use a
virtual platform such as Zoom even after the pandemic is over. Because Zoom is not the only
video service in the market, it will endure increased competition to secure large long-term clients
such as those that will use the platform in lieu of physical interactions. The differentiating
properties from competing companies include the price, ease, privacy and security, and overall
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platform performance. Zoom would need to spend some time updating and solidifying this to
keep a strong market share.
Alongside the Mac, PC, iOS, and Android app downloads, the company has an
opportunity to create a fully functional web based application for individuals who may not have
the opportunity to download an application to a shared computer. As of right now Zoom web
client only works with limited chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge with limited capabilities.
Facebook, Inc. has built their entire platform online giving them the ability to have a video
conference without having to download an entire app. The investment into Zoom’s research and
development department to expand their web client platform would yield a high return due to the
fact that they would be one of the first major players to integrate a web based version of their
application across multiple browsers. Alternatively, the company can plan to merge with or
acquire a company that has created such an infrastructure to implement a platform that works
with a wide range of browsers and systems.
Although coronavirus vaccines that are expected to roll out in December would probably
mean fewer Zoom users, its financial performance on the stock market has been remarkable with
a current share price gain of 404% between mid-March and November 2020. It is safe to say that
Zoom will be a tool that will continue to be beneficial for the near and further future. The
software of Zoom Video Communications, Inc. is not going away.
 16

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 20

Appendix

This project outlining the marketing strategy of Zoom Communication, Inc. was
completed by group members Edgar Collett, Tanyaradzwa Godza, Louis Kreidler, Adrianna
Mallory, Ben Nagel, Samuel Slivka, Jakub Szafraniec, and Nikki Zamora-Madrid. Tanyaradzwa
Godza was the team leader with Ben Nagel as the assistant team leader.

The following link leads to the video previously mentioned in the “Advertising
Campaign” section of this work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=VnyitUU4DUY&feature=emb_logo.