Era of bonehead branding from MSN comes to a close
Microsoft has now officially announced the relaunch and re-branding of Microsoft Live Search as Bing.com. One of the biggest branding blunders in Internet history, “Live Search” will thankfully go the way of the dodo.
Take this as a lesson: make sure your brand sounds like a brand. If I were to tell you that Microsoft was launching a product called “Cool Search” would you guess that it was on cool.com? Unlikely. You’d probably look on Microsoft.com, or perhaps coolsearch.com, both of which would be disappointing. When your brand sounds too much like a plain old adjective, you need to attach the .com.
They could have avoided all this and capitalized on the excellent domain Live.com by using the name Microsoft Live.com Search. It is a mouthful, but it would give you a much better idea of where to go to search. But now, with their users thoroughly confused, they’ve decided to give up and rebrand entirely to Bing.com. Some may criticize the lighthearted and nonsensical nature of the word “bing”, but I applaud the move - it’s short, it’s memorable, and if their new features are competitive with the other search engines, it’ll help build brand awareness and loyalty. Bing won’t challenge Google anytime soon, but it would be nice to have a viable alternative.
