"Differentiation
Can Be Brutal in the Web Search Business."
By Andrew Goodman
"Search engine positioning" is no easy
feat - even if you *are* a search engine, it seems. So how are
the engines positioning *themselves*?
Along with the unauthorized biography of Jerry
Seinfeld, my holiday fun reading was a business book: Differentiate
or Die by Trout and Rivkin. Suddenly, the laws of positioning
rule my daily thoughts.
As the authors hilariously recite, in the old
days, advertising gurus would lament the lameness of sales copy.
But in those days, in spite of many mistakes being made, at least
they were trying to sell something. Today's vexing branding campaigns
appear to actually dissuade the viewer from thinking about the
product or the company. How's this slogan for a great use of an
airline's advertising dollars? "Welcome Aboard. Really."
(That was somebody's advertising slogan. Really.)
So many companies go so wrong by ignoring the
fundamental principles of positioning; primary amongst them being
the fact that there is only so much space in the consumer's fried
brain. You can't occupy valuable mindshare by simply *saying*
something unique, though. You've got to *have* something unique.
Your product needs to be something different, and your company
needs to walk the walk on a consistent basis.
I'm sure you can think of many examples of fuzzy
positioning and poor communications, and just as many that seem
to almost uncannily "get it." I watched with some awe
when Honda rolled out a campaign with race car driver Jacques
Villeneuve zooming around in a plain old Honda Civic and then
saying seriously: "Inside every Honda, there's a Honda engine."
Honda engines have a great reputation amongst knowledgeable drivers
and automotive writers. Why not leverage that, and remind people
that it's the engine that makes the car go, not the leasing options
or the keyless remote entry? Honda has the right idea.
It's true that your product doesn't necessarily
have to embody the qualities that you associate it with any better
than your competitor's products, particularly if you're the leader.
AOL's "It's so easy to use, no wonder it's #1" is believed
by many of its users, even though most non-users would dispute
the claim of "ease of use." The point is, AOL as the
"Internet with training wheels" has always had a clear
identity. The ads show ordinary-looking people sitting around
kitchen tables talking about things AOL lets them do online. The
ease-of-use, family-appropriate theme is never confusing, always
the same. For their customers, there is not only a tangible monetary
and time cost to switching, there's also a mental price to be
paid for even thinking about it. That mental price is yet steeper
when you're a self-professed novice.
You can get addicted to thinking about positioning.
Welch's grape juice has been a favorite of mine for years. Last
year, they reformulated their concentrated juice so that it became
a "drink" - replacing much of the natural juice with
sugar and fake stuff. I've since discovered that a company called
Black River actually makes juice that tastes so much like real
juice, it's like being inside the grape. I'm willing to bet Welch's
loses market share with its me-too "drink," since all
companies like Black River have to say is: "Black River juice.
It's actually juice. Juice. Really." Imagine leaving a hole
in your market by allowing a small competitor the chance to claim
it's *actually delivering* to consumers what you *used to* deliver
before you decided to pull the wool over your customers' eyes.
Like we aren't going to notice? Imagine if winemakers tried that
stunt. "Chateau de Piffle: We decided to make it with dandelions,
but to appease you, we've doubled the alcohol content."
In any case, the search industry isn't exempt
from the laws of positioning. Consumers only have so much memory.
There are a lot of ways to lose in this business. It's brutal.
Here's a review of current and past contenders
for mindshare supremacy in the web search business, and what they
might say if asked for a brief positioning statement.
AltaVista: “Once, we were
the world’s leading search engine. Then we were a portal.
Now, we’re yesterday’s search engine.” In a
world where what’s next matters most, this spells D-O-O-M.
They have an enterprise business, to be sure, but one wonders
if even that can survive given the FUD that is spreading about
the company’s commitment. We suspect that it would be better
for AV to scatter its ashes and make way for a regrowth of something
fresh and hot.
Ask Jeeves: “Ask a question,
get an answer.” Unfortunately the technology didn’t
work as advertised, and it has been beefed up with the recently-acquired
Teoma, which has great technology but too closely resembles the
category leader, Google. Long term result: fuzzy branding, lack
of differentiation. Selling Jeeves merchandise doesn’t help
the company’s focus any, either.
Hotbot: “We used to be
the hottest, coolest, search engine on the net. A long, long time
ago. Then, we became best known for serving stale Inktomi results
and as one of the only places to submit free to the Inktomi index,
until Ink stopped accepting free submissions. More recently, we
shut down the old site and created this quirky metasearch engine
to help Inktomi get some press so it could get bought out by Yahoo.
Now we’re stuck with this cool little site that no one will
use. Much like the old Hotbot.”
Prediction: after an initial
bout of tire-kicking, Hotbot will be used by experts and insiders,
not consumers. Gary Price (a research expert) loves it, for example.
That’s a great start, and it’s good to impress the
experts. But that does not always translate into consumer adoption.
The new Hotbot is cool, but it won’t be hot. They'll try
to make it so, however, with a $1 million ad campaign with the
tagline "More Search. More Engine."
Truth in advertising wouldn't have worked. Then
they would have had to say: "Somebody else's search. Somebody
else's engine." Ouch.
Inktomi: “We’ve
always been one of the biggest and best indexes and have been
through various generations of relevance ranking technology. Our
differentiator was that we sold ourselves not to consumers, but
to portal partners. We now work for Yahoo.”
We’ll be watching very closely to see if
post-acquisition “blahs” water down the quality of
Inktomi-powered Yahoo Search. One good thing about being acquired
and having no hope of selling your product to your acquirer’s
competitors: no need to differentiate, since it’s Yahoo’s
overall navigational experience and product lineup that now takes
center stage, while Inktomi quietly powers one part of that. Inktomi
has this “keeping quiet” strategy pretty well figured
out. So much so that they nearly went belly up.
Metacrawler: “We do metasearch.
In fact, the brand name Metacrawler has become something of a
generic term for metasearch.”
You can’t argue with that, so long as they
continue to do what they say and don’t water it down with
too many undifferentiated paid results. Metasearch users really
want metasearch. To do this, there need to be enough reputable
search sources to actually perform a metasearch on. This is a
great brand that hangs in the balance. It would do best by staying
the course, and focusing on “being” metasearch. That
means keeping an eye out for product features that might generate
industry buzz, and in general, continuing to be “metasearch
geeks.” If the metasearch leader can’t act as an advocate
for metasearch, no one else is going to do it. Fortunately for
metacrawler, Hotbot is spending $1 million on a fancy Hill Holliday
ad campaign to do just this. Metacrawler should wait until the
dust settles, then come back and remind users just who “invented”
metasearch. Might not even take a million bucks to do it.
Dogpile: “Look at this
big, fun pile of stuff!”
Another metasearch engine – this one aims
at novices. Today, many of those novices – even the AOL
gang - like Google, but still fail to truly appreciate or understand
metasearch. No matter. What’s important is that they seem
to like it. “If you can’t find it here, you can’t
find it” they say. These users believe the proposition and
remember the name of the product. It’s not going to take
over the world, but it’s going to hold its own as long as
there is a crowd of people who can appreciate a non-technical
explanation of why metasearch is useful. Woof woof woof. That
means "we're connecting now with the consumers Hotbot hopes
it can find."
Excite Search, Webcrawler: “We’re
old brands that Infospace now serves ads on.” Strictly short
term stuff. There really is such a thing as too much ad-laden
metasearch, believe it or not. Even if you take away some of the
ads, what’s the difference? Can you see a difference? No
one has cared about Webcrawler for ten years.
Direct Hit: Special mention
is warranted, since “popularity engine” was a unique
category that caught the fancy of many users. Unfortunately the
technology didn’t work too well, and what’s left of
it, after the bloated $500 million (all stock, whose value promptly
plunged 95%) Ask Jeeves acquisition, has been integrated into
Teoma, which powers Ask Jeeves. Good little boost for Teoma…
if Teoma can ever grab some market share under the wing of Ask
Jeeves, which seems improbable. There are all too many stories
like this. Unique stories that were overhyped and then, underhyped.
At the market bottom many got shut down. The “popularity
engine” concept is alive and well in several places. It
will peek its head out again someday in a pure play or two.
Google: “We’re #1.
We lead the planet in the number of search queries served, and
we’re the #4 web site in the world, trailing only the top
three portals in traffic. Our product is indispensable. We have
been first and best in various aspects of the delivery of search
engine results, and have implemented our revenue model without
disrupting that bread and butter. People even marvel at how fast
the search engine is. People just love the product.”
Needless to say, these are the types of things
only a leader can say. People love the product. They equate the
product (Google) with the category (search). This can last a long
time if there is sufficient homage paid to what got them here
in the first place. So far, so good.
I do worry that Google will indeed knock itself
out of its own advantageous position. Having stumbled into the
clean, search-only site design, Google's "keep it simple,
stupid" message was what pulled people in (it was only later
that these users appreciated the sophistication of the technology).
That simplicity was so important to Google's success, others tried
in vain to copy it (AltaVista's Raging Search, for example). Today,
Google is branching out into a few other things. Unlike the AltaVista
portal folly, though, Google's multiple priorities - Usenet search,
news search, image search, shopping search, etc. - all do involve
its core competency, which is search. I really did not like it
when they started monkeying with Google Answers, the research-on-demand
service. It's all too easy for smart people like these Googlers
to get bored and lose track. Hopefully some seasoned management
types will save the smart people from themselves.
100Hot: Remember that one? Acquired
by Go2Net, then left to die on the vine. Kind of like a mini-Alexa
or mini-Media-Metrix thing, except they gave up on making it work
and just made it into the same old thing, a listing of a bunch
of sites paying for placement. Advertising in itself is not a
search engine. Never has been. Another sad story. A technology
that the end user apparently cared more about than its inventors
did.
FAST Search: “We’re
#3, and we supply search results to the #4 portal.”
Good enough? Relatively speaking, not bad. But
not an entirely enviable position to be in. Product differentiation
efforts have more or less failed to make the desired impact, as
the main competition, Inktomi, Altavista, and Google, can leapfrog
FAST in the product department, at least as far as consumers are
concerned. At the same time, now that Inktomi is Yahoo’s
property, FAST becomes a sort-of-#2 contender and possible successor
to Inktomi as the MSN supplier. And they become a minor threat
if and when the AOL-Google partnership comes up for renewal.
FAST’s early potential differentiator,
speed, is a non-factor since Google is probably faster.
We’d recommend that FAST continue to pursue
a “we’re #2 so we try harder” type of image.
If they are going to come out with product features, they must
be features that Google can’t match or beat (most of the
hype we’ve seen so far from FAST has been equaled by others
shortly afterwards… remember, I’m not talking about
industry insiders who may see subtle differences, I’m talking
about what consumers need and want out of a search tool). If FAST
intends to take a lead in news search, for example, it’ll
need to do more than tweak. (Otherwise, Google, Moreover, and
Altavista, to say nothing of well-managed portals, can kick their
butt from a consumer-recognition standpoint.)
In the meantime, custom work for the enterprise
sector is a nice honest living to supplement the consumer side.
And last, but not least:
Library of Congress “Explore the Web”
page: “We’re the frickin Library of Congress.”
It coulda been a contender. Really.
|
