Bing Marketing Mix (4Ps) & Marketing Strategy
Marketing strategy of Bing through marketing mix framework which covers the 4Ps (Product, Price, Place, Promotion).
Bing Product Strategy:
Bing is one of the leading web portal search engines in the world. Bing provides a number of features to its users, some of which are, the ‘interface features’ which include daily changing background images, left side navigation pane, right side extended preview and sublinks, ‘media features’ like video thumbnail preview, image search with continuous scrolling images, and advanced filters and operators, it provides instant answers, local information like business listings, current traffic, restaurant reviews, weather updates etc and ‘translator’ which can translate texts or entire web pages into different languages. Bing’s central mission is to help users search less and do more. Bing constantly try to make their search experience more efficient and have a product search experience that shows relevant products directly in the main results page. This way the user does not waste time navigating through pages to find what they’re looking for.
Image: company website
This concludes the product strategy in Bing marketing mix & strategy.
Bing Price/Pricing Strategy:
Below is the pricing strategy in Bing marketing mix strategy:
Bing earns its income through advertising. When a user searches for something on the engine and types in a key word, the engine displays the results for it.
However, there are usually a series of advertisements at the top right hand side of the results. These advertisements are paid for by companies as their brand is being promoted on the search engine. They are basically word based advertisements that are bought by the company. So every time the user clicks on the advert, Bing will get paid by the advertiser. Bing has lesser competition and cheaper costing, they offer a more granular control i.e. they let you set your location, network, language etc, they have better device targeting options, they offer more transparency over partner targeting, and Bing ads allow to control search demographics.
Read more about Bing
Bing Place & Distribution Strategy:
Following is the distribution strategy in the Bing marketing mix:
Bing has its headquarters in Bellevue, Washington. Being an online business, it can be used by users anywhere around the world. It is available in many languages and has been localized for many countries. According to ComScore Desktop search Engine rankings, Bing got close to 3600+ million searches in the US per month which translates to 122 million searches per day and 1420+ searches per second. It has been found that users who use Bing are an older and wealthier collection of searchers; most of their users are 35+ in age and commonly between the 55-65 age brackets.
They are also more likely to have children based on their age and tend to be less tech savvy.
Bing Promotion & Advertising Strategy:
The promotional and advertising strategy in the Bing marketing mix is as follows:
In 2010, Microsoft launched its first television ad campaign to promote Bing. It launched 3 TV ads as a part of the campaign, and ran a concentrated marketing push for the next three months. The main agenda of the ads was to show that Bing simplifies the information overload that is caused by many other search engines. The ad shows situations where ordinary people are asking for information and receiving absolutely nonsensical answers in return by certain words being picked up and spoken in an entirely different context, because that is what many search engines tend to do. The ads convey that Bing is not just a search engine, it is the first-ever decision engine from Microsoft. In 2012, Bing launched another campaign called; Bing is for #Doing, which showed people doing interesting things and using the slogan. The campaign focuses on winter sports athletes like Bobby Brown, Kaitlyn Farrington and Kevin Pierce. Their stories were aired on TV and also promoted through social media campaigns online.
Since this is a service marketing brand, here are the other three Ps to make it the 7Ps marketing mix of Bing.
Physical Evidence:
Being an online search engine, Bing can be used pretty much anywhere be it a corporate office, a lounge, a restaurant or a café, or a home. The homepage of the Bing search engine features photography which is used as the background and changes every day. These photographs are taken by 14 different professional image providers including the Bill-gates owned Corbis. Every few weeks, the team gathers up to vote for what photographs should be used for the homepage. Bing also use event specific photographs, for example, India’s Holi festival or the solar eclipse. These photographs make the homepage look very attractive and are one of the reasons why the number of users increases.
People:
At Bing, all the employees are encouraged to contribute to the process by sharing their viewpoints. It is the diversity of such viewpoints that helps create innovative and creative ideas. The ideas of the employees are encouraged by providing different opportunities through which they can contribute comfortably. Employees who are ready for experimentation, are always curious, have relentless commitment towards their job and pay attention to quality are appreciated at Bing. Due to the rapidly changing industry, people who have to skill of taking quick and accurate decisions in any situation are preferred by Bing.
Process:
As an online search engine, Bing tries to connect the users with the most relevant search results and provide easy access to the content provided by web publishers. To do this, it builds URLs to display as a set of search results. These pages may contain various resources and content including websites, images, videos etc. The search results are generated using computer algorithms to match the search term the user enters. These algorithms are continuously redesigned and improved to provide the most relevant and useful results. This completes the marketing mix of Bing.
About Bing:
Bing is a web search engine that provides a variety of search services including image, video, web and map search products. It is owned and operated by Microsoft and was made public by the CEO Steve Ballmer on the 28th of May, 2009 and released on the 1st of June, 2009.
It was Microsoft’s replacement for Live Search. As of 2015, Bing is the second largest search engine in the US.
Browse marketing strategy and 4Ps analysis of more brands similar to Bing. The Marketing Mix & Strategy section covers 4Ps and 7Ps of more than 800 brands in 2 categories.
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