‘Bing Is For #Doing’, So Says Microsoft
Bing launched as a ‘decision engine’, with Microsoft trying to shift the attention away from Google’s ‘search engine’. Now Microsoft is upping its game.
In a new series of commercials playing on TV from this weekend, Microsoft is extolling the virtues of Bing in a big, bold way. By stating that Bing is for #Doing. The first commercial (embedded below) features American snowboarder Kevin Pearce as he sets out to overcome an injury which put him out of the 2010 Winter Olympics.
The idea of the new campaign is to further differentiate Bing from Google. And it’s a direct evolution from the ‘decision engine’ campaign Microsoft used to launch Bing. Bing is for #Doing suggests that while searching on Google is a means to an end, leading you to somewhere else on the Web, Bing provides tools which could enable you to stay on the site to actually do the thing you wanted to.
The problem is while it’s a nice idea, in reality there is little that Bing is offering over and above what Google is offering. In fact, in many ways Microsoft has followed the patterns laid down by Google in offering things such as Image Search, News, Video Playback, and Shopping. But I guess that doesn’t matter at this moment in time.
All Microsoft is really trying to do here is wean people off Google, which has become the ubiquitous method of indexing and searching the Web. At the moment Bing is a nice alternative if Google doesn’t provide an answer to a query, but it needs to build market share to do anything beyond that.
Despite Microsoft’s best efforts Google still enjoys around 66 percent of the search market share in the U.S. Bing and Yahoo! combined makes up the majority of the rest. This campaign clearly won’t push Bing over the top, but it is at least a good start in making that happen.
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