¶ … Microsoft Bong and Google Using TheFour Ps of Marketing Comparing Microsoft Bing and Google Using the Marketing Mix

Google's dominance of the search market globally continues despite the aggressive launch in 2009 of Bing, a new search engine, by Microsoft. To date, Google is still the most preferred search engine globally, with a commanding market share lead (Grensing-Pophal, 2012). Both of these search engines are financed through advertising revenues, with Google's AdWords being the most profitable online advertising platform globally today as well. Microsoft's Bing advertising strategies have gravitated towards paid search and more traditional forms of online business models (Grensing-Pophal, 2012). These have been somewhat successful in raising the profitability of the Online Division of Microsoft, known as one of the least profitable in the entire company (Vance, 2012). Google on the other hand continues to be one of the most consistently profitable businesses in the high technology sector, often surpassing revenue and profitability targets on a consistent basis (Cho, 2009). The intent of this analysis is to evaluate each of these companies using the marketing mix, which is comprised of product, price, promotion and place or distribution. Place will be interpreted as their actual website and location online.

Analysis of Google and Microsoft Bing Using the Market Mix Framework

Both of these companies have world-class depth of expertise in new product development, software development, enterprise software sales and service, and innovation best practices. Despite sharing these attributes both are very different in terms of culture which has a direct effect on their planning, execution and management of the marketing mix. Innovation is also at the core of Google as they have a policy of allowing engineers 20% of their time to experiment and develop their ideas into projects (Klie, 2010). The Google culture also allows for engineers to manage their products through the entire new product development process as well, gaining visibility and advancing their careers in the process (Iyer, Davenport, 2008). Called the Rule of 20%, this strategy as of 2010 was responsible for products delivering 57% of total revenues for the company (Klie, 2010). Based on an analysis...

This innovation pipeline Google has created with the Rule of 20% makes them a very formidable competitor to the more conservative and hierarchically-managed Microsoft (Grensing-Pophal, 2012). These cultural factors have a direct effect on the marketing mix each chooses to rely on for positioning themselves in the market.
Product

In the context of their search services and platforms, Google and Microsoft have taken completely different approaches from a technological level to attain their current level of performance and customer experience (Manyika, 2009). For Google the reliance on their latent semantic indexing (LSI) technologies continue to deliver faster, more accurate results than Bing consistently (Grensing-Pophal, 2012). Microsoft has also been working on contextually-based search technologies, yet Google is significantly further ahead as evidenced by the Panda updates and impressive gains in Android application development. Google's search engine, by virtue of the global leadership of the company's Android operating system, is on more devices than any other search engine today (Vance, 2012). Google is concentrating on creating a mobile platform that can scale globally quickly, encompassing both mobile or smartphones, tablets and hybrid devices still under development. All of these initiatives are meant to further extent their core product, the search engine and its highly profitable Google AdWords service, pervasively across the globe (Klie, 2010). The Google AdWords business model is highly effective in creating recurring revenue flows that assure a continual stream of investment capital for new projects being generated through the Rule of 20% campaigns (Grensing-Pophal, 2012). Microsoft has their Windows 8 mobile operating system, yet it lacks proven reliability as it has not shipped in volume yet. The Google Android operating system however is now in nearly its fifth generation and is the most used mobility platform operating system in the world (Grensing-Pophal, 2012). Google is betting that mobile platforms will dominate global Internet use within the next five years, while Microsoft…