Redmond, Washington — With the holiday season approaching, software monopolist Microsoft in a surprising twist, announced that they are re-branding its Bing Daily Deals product and shifted the brand to MSN. Earlier, it was “Bing Deals” powered by Tippr, will soon be re-branded as MSN Offers.
Apparently, the service currently lets you subscribe to daily emails notifying you about the best deals in your local area, which you can purchase and then redeem via the website before the deal expires.
So why this sudden change? A spokesperson for MSN said they service was easily being jumbled up with another Bing service called “Bing Deals”. Think about Bing as aggregator extraordinaire, which aggregates over 200,00 deals for major deal providers and retailers, including Groupon, LivingSocial, Nordstrom, Target and many others, all in one place.
The change was the outcome of an effort to clear up perceived confusion. In a statement from MSN, we find out more details:
“We wanted to notify you that Bing Daily Deals will soon be re-named as MSN Offers. It has the same great set of values in your local area, but we wanted to clear up confusion between the Daily Deals you receive via email and the Bing Deals feature which aggregates daily deals from hundreds of providers at Bing.com/Deals. Moreover, better aligning Daily Deals with MSN, where you can go to find the best things going on in your local area, seems to make good sense.”
Image Credit: (Searchengineland)
The Redmond, Wash.-based company assured their current customers the transition would be seamless: “You do not need to do or change a thing. You will still be getting the same great deals, with the same account information.”
Although it makes sense to adopt MSN to promote and expose deals, given the site’s enormous traffic, detaching daily deals from other types of deals may create more confusion than it avoids. Other deal-centric sites such as Savings.com and the newspaper-owned FindnSave attempt to be consolidated, “one stop” destinations, aggregating coupons, retail sales information and daily deals for consumer convenience.
However, this novel re-branding from Bing Deals to MSN Offers is something of a meaningful for the challenge that Microsoft has faced in managing the relationship between Bing and MSN, including which one it wants to promote as the primary consumer brand.
The site is already live and you can now visit the new MSN Offers website, available at http://www.msnoffers.com.