Brighter Marketing

Seth Godin has an interesting take on the new search engine that Microsoft are planning to develop and launch. The new search engine will be called BING (But It’s Not Google) and the marketing budget alone is said to be $100m. Seth wonders why they are spending this amount of money on trying to emulate something that already exists. A thought echoed by Al and Laura Reiss in their book The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, which talks about being first into a market.

You always remember the first into the market and the brand name normally becomes a woven into the language. For example, Hoover, Kleenex, Sellotape and Google it. You tend to remember firsts such as the first man on the moon, first woman to fly the Atlantic and so on. You don’t tend to remember seconds. As Seth points out

“Google is not seen as broken by many people, and a hundred million dollars trying to persuade us that it is, is money poorly spent. In times of change, the rule is this:

Don’t try to be the ‘next’. Instead, try to be the other, the changer, the new”

So don’t try to simply make your product or service better, innovate come up with something new. It doesn’t have to a new invention just think about how you can modify or merge what you have already into something new. Be first into the market and take a look at our recent blog post on marketing innovation.

Link to Seth’s Blog article http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/05/the-next-google.html