Advertising Branding etc. - Design, Advertising, & Branding

bing.com Microsoft’s latest and greatest search engine that has been well received since launch, it quickly attacked it’s market and gained about 1/3 the visits google.com receives. But in the recent months it has slowly plateaued at about 50-55 million unique visitors according to compete.com ( I can’t say I whole heatedly trust the results ).

This leads me to ask, what’s stopping bing from growing? It has a prettier interface, it has a better search experience. Is it the known comfort factor that google.com offers, is it a million of the keep it simple functionality systems that they employ that make searching somewhat less painful. Or could it be and this is a real stretch that bing’s identity just sucks, and it’s effecting what people think of their service/brand. And even worse it’s something that they could get sick of, and not want to see again. I even go one step further, because the identity was so bad in the first place that it got peoples attention in a way that Yahoo first did it’s gimmicky TV spots on the SuperBowl ( remember yyaaa Hoooooooo. )

There is a lot to say about bad-design and its trends in the creative field as a strategic method for basically grabbing peoples attention. When you hear your repetitive yet always consistent furniture ads or car ads that’s jingle or message or creative as a whole has driven you up the wall, you remember their tone of voice and brand. Maybe you don’t like them but you remember them, it’s a bit of an invasion tactic but I guess it works for some businesses.  I’ll reference one of the worst culprits of this strategy out in Syracuse where I went to school back in 2001-2005, note that I heard these guys actually did quite well from their advertising. I wonder how their doing these days after the recession anyways. Here’s the video enjoy:

If bing’s logo is what’s holding it back, the issue with the brand isn’t the name itself bing, its the typeface and execution of this thing. It’s hokey and its fairly tough to read without moving your eye all-the-way through-it and it takes a little longer recognize than Googles logo, even though it’s playfully always changing. And I think honestly bing is missing the point with it’s landing page. Albeit it’s prettier than Google’s it’s just too busy. People want to focus  straight to the search button and then if they choose they will look at the other subjects if their interested. In the current site design you’re looking at the picture of the island with its cool factors and oh that relates to searching, lets put that on the home page.. and then you got a few key sections on the left. It’s not a bad layout but strategically the focus of searching becomes secondary to the image, and that to me seems like a mistake for the majority of search users who are looking for an easy to use layout. Save the beautiful imagery for your sections, ad campaigns or as background elements. Good luck bing, we’re rooting for you I do give thumbs up to your ad campaign from 2009, I think it largely responsible for generating the initial gain in visitors and users to the site.

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