Boaz Berkowitz

Who Benefited from Microsoft's Bing Cashback?

I covered the cashback program in depth in some of my recent articles:

seekingalpha.com/artic...

seekingalpha.com/artic...

But one question remains is will there be a lasting impact? I for one did make use of this promotion, but my loyalty has not increased at all. I simply go to which ever cashback promotion offers the highest payout (usually bing since they use their cashback program as a loss leader but not always - sometimes the competition has a better promotion or features a store that Bing is not partnered with). I suspect most other users are the same - this kind of promotion specifically appeals to price sensitive customers. In other words, they'll go where ever they can get the best deal. So using the current strategy, Microsoft may only build market share by literally paying users to search with Bing. As strategies go, that isn't sustainable for the long term.

Plus I've been dismally unimpressed with Bing's support. My wife had a problem where all of her cashback was inexplicably canceled. She's been waiting for the problem to be resolved for over a month to know available. We never had that sort of trouble with other cashback sites like Fatwallet, Ebates, Mrrebates, etc.

As an advertising tactic though, it was brilliant. A few months ago, no one heard of Bing. Within its first few weeks, already 1 in 4 US adults recognized the name somewhat. That is quite an impressive feat. I don't know how much money Microsoft blew on this promotion, but it could easily have been less than a mass advertising campaign would have cost them. And was likely more effective too.