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I admit it.  I am not a lover of the business practices of all things Google, and yet when I need to look something up online, where do I go?  You guessed it.  The Big G.  Google managed to quite successfully win over much of the public through the years with their approach to search, and the fact that there aren’t big old ads all over the place when you try to look something up.

But now, Microsoft intends to grab a big piece of that search pie.  They are doing it with a rather large ad campaign for their search engine Bing.  Large as in $80 to $100 million being spent on the campaign.  Now, considering Google only spent $25 million total in advertising last year, that’s a rather impressive dollar-to-dollar comparison.

Apparently, they don’t plan to play the same game they did when they went after Apple in their marketing attacks.  Google, (or Yahoo), won’t be mentioned directly by name.  They are going to be all just “planting the idea” that the search engines of today don’t work as well as consumers thought by asking them whether or not search (ahem…that would be Google), really solves their problems. 

How subliminal of you Microsoft!  The software giant is hoping that by doing so, it will give consumers a reason to think about switching engines.  This switch, is what is what is probably going to be one of Bing’s biggest hurdles.

The reality is, most people are happy with their search.  But, that could simply be because they don’t know there could be something better.  “If you grab the average user off the street and ask them, ‘Does search suck?’ I think they’d say no. They don’t know what else can be done,” said Shashi Seth, a former Google executive who is now chief revenue officer at Cooliris. “They think search does a pretty good job, and if you could prove otherwise with a product that’s differentiated, people will sit up and take notice.”

Seth compared the Bing marketing challenge to what the Apple iPhone was faced with when it was first being introduced.  Before the iPhone, people didn’t realize they were missing a mulit-touch screen, or a phone with all those apps.  But Apple successfully used ads to show the totally different user experience, and it has now for many become the standard for smartphones.

Another hill Microsoft is going to have to climb is that obviously their product is going to have to do something the current ones aren’t doing.  However, the Google brand name is so ingrained is so many minds as THE search engine it is going to be an amazingly hard sell to cross that mindset.  This is shown by the fact that Google has conducted some internal tests, where the company put its logo and treatment on the results of another search engine.  Users still picked those results…even though they were not true Google results.  They were picking the Google brand  “I don’t think they can win this game with a better mousetrap,” said Allen Adamson, managing director of Landor Associates, New York. “They have to compete with Google on a brand front—there’s no other way to skin this but go head on against the Google brand.”

Microsoft did it with Apple.  Brazenly.  And it is showing in the numbers of respondents of 18-34 year olds, who they were targeting.  But again, they can advertise all they want and they need something solid to back it.  Folks who have see Bing say it doesn’t really have a different looking interface (except for some of the multimedia results), although it has some cool filtering tools, and that it is rather useful. 

It doesn’t take a whole lot to get people to type in a new URL to at least try it one or two times.  But if they want people coming back and making a permanent switch from that other search engine they better have something really unique that will keep them.

via: [adage]