Author Archives: ghotchkiss

Will Google X Get Google’s Mojo Back?

First published May 31, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

What do you do when the search engine you started up with your fellow uber-geek partner makes you fabulously wealthy, but somehow all the billions it’s raking in leaves you feeling rather empty?

What do you do when you’re no longer the darling of the mainstream press, who once enthused that no challenge was too daunting for you and your company full of exceptionally gifted and only slightly less egotistical baby geniuses?

Well, if you’re Sergey Brin, you find a new toy. You leave the mind-numbingly mundane business of running a multibillion-dollar mega-corporation to your power-tripping co-founder, and you lock yourself away in an undisclosed office somewhere in Silicon Valley, spending your day playing with robots, space elevators, virtual reality glasses and self-driving cars.

You go back to what you wanted to do in the first place, which was to “put a ding in the universe.” And it’s probably no coincidence that you’re following in the footsteps of your “love me or hate me” mentor, the late Steve Jobs.

Say what you want about Google, I don’t think there’s any doubt that Brin and Page wanted to change the world in substantial (and hopefully non-evil) ways when they started. But the business of running a business tends to make one put ideals on hold and focus on the bottom line. Taking your company public doesn’t help. Shareholders typically value revenue over revolution, profits over prophesy. “Sure, robots and space elevators are cool, but tell me how that’s going to contribute to our quarterly earnings?” Public companies, by necessity, tend to focus on the short term rather than the long.

But Brin has never been a short-term guy. Neither has Page, for that matter. They both love to take something and spin it into a grandiose vision. For Page, he felt he could best realize that by taking over the leadership of Google. But for all the power that comes with that role, there’s also a heaping helping of compromise. Brin apparently felt more comfortable in the more idealistic environs of the Google-X Lab.

If you’re not familiar with Google X, it’s a super-secret hidden laboratory where an ultra-powerful super computer and high tech gadgets allow the billionaire to fight crime… no, wait, that’s the Bat Cave. Google X is a secret laboratory where Brin has been spending a lot of time lately. In a New York Times article from last November, it’s described as a, “clandestine lab where Google is tackling a list of 100 shoot-for-the-stars ideas. Google is so secretive about the effort that many employees do not even know the lab exists.”

What are some of these “shoot-for-the-star” ideas? There is no definitive list, given the “hush hush” nature of Google X, but third-party reports commonly mention space elevators, driverless cars, connected household appliances, and one project that is starting to see the light of day: Google Glass, wearable technology that someday could bring a Google interface to the world around us (more about this in a future column).

Google X certainly doesn’t suffer from a lack of ambition. It’s the type of thing we used to routinely expect from the Google we knew and loved.  And it’s got oodles of “cool”: robots and space elevators and driverless cars, oh my! But these types of skunk work projects are often just a way to pacify a few highly placed egos and keep them out of the way while the real work of the company gets done by those who are a little less grandiose in their ambitions.

And Google X does suffer from Google’s long-term problem of trying to do everything at once. The company has always had a problem with focus. Unlike Google X, Jobs’ lofty ambitions and breakaway projects at Apple were tied to a product that would ship sometime in the next decade. Don’t expect to see a space elevator coming to your neighborhood anytime soon.

So the question remains: Will Google X define the future of Google, or is it just a plaything to keep Sergey happy? Only time will tell.

Living Beyond Our Expectations

First published May 25, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

To my father-in-law, the Internet is a big black box that he doesn’t understand, but inside of which, all is possible. This became clear to me after the following conversation:

F-I-L: Gord?

Me: Yes?

F-I-L: Can you go on your computer and find the combination for my safe?

Me: Huh?

F-I-L: I have an old safe that I locked years ago and I can’t remember the combination. I thought you could probably find it on your computer.

Of course, by “computer,” he meant the Internet. To him, the Internet is the sum collection of all information, and in that, he’s not far wrong. Chances are, in some archive of manufacturer’s data somewhere, the lost combination probably exists. If it does, it’s just one database call away from being public. One would hope that this information would always remain private, but my point is, as naïve as my father-in-law’s question seems to be, it’s probably not that far removed from reality.

Technology and our expectations of what’s possible also seem to play a game of cat and mouse.  No matter what we dream up, it seems that it becomes reality in the blink of an eye. In fact, I suspect that technology now regularly outpaces our wildest dreams. Almost anything is possible, at least in theory. If it doesn’t exist, it’s probably just that it’s not practical. Nobody has bothered to put in the effort to make it happen.

Consider marketing intelligence, for instance. Remember the first time you encountered what John Battelle dubbed the “database of intentions”? It was Google’s query data, and Battelle had what he called a “Holy Sh*t” moment when he realized:

This information represents, in aggregate form, a place holder for the intentions of humankind – a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, supoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends. Such a beast has never before existed in the history of culture, but is almost guaranteed to grow exponentially from this day forward. This artifact can tell us extraordinary things about who we are and what we want as a culture. And it has the potential to be abused in equally extraordinary fashion.

For marketers, Google had provided us with the biggest source of marketing intelligence ever compiled. It was the crystallization of consumer intent, in searchable form. We collectively salivated over it.

But that was a decade ago. Now, as marketers, we routinely curse the gaps in and shortcomings of Google’s query data. As powerful as it once seemed, our expectations have leapfrogged ahead of it.

Battelle has recently updated his definition of the database of intent, adding four new “fields” to it. Originally there was the search “query,” signaling “what I want.” Now, the “social graph” indicates “who I am” and “who I know.” The “status update” signals “what I’m doing” and “what’s happening.” The “check-in” signals “where I am.” And the “purchase” signals “what I’m buying.”

For a marketer, this is mind-blowing stuff.  The trick, of course, is to bring this all together in a meaningful way. To do so, there are multiple technology, intellectual property and privacy hurdles to get over. But it’s all very doable. It’s administration, not technology, that’s holding us back. A big part of Facebook’s IPO valuation was based on successfully pulling this off.

Again, technology has dangled a possibility at the leading edge of our expectations. But it will happen. And when it does, it will suddenly seem ho-hum to us. Our expectations will rocket forward to another possibility.

But even as fast as our expectations move, I guarantee, somewhere, someone is already working on something that lies beyond anything we ever dreamed of. Thank goodness our expectations are as elastic as they seem to be.

Brand Beliefs and the Facebook Factor

First published May 17, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week I talked about the power of our beliefs to shape our view of the world around us. I also mentioned how our belief constructs impact our view of brands. As luck would have it, two separate pieces crossed my path this week, both of which provide excellent examples of how we may perceive brands, and how marketers often get it wrong when trying to shepherd a brand through the marketplace.

The first piece was “Does Branding Need to be Rebranded?” by Mediapost’s Matt Straz in Online Spin. In it, Matt mentioned the backlash against Sir James Dyson (he of the cool vacuums) when he dared to mention that he doesn’t believe in branding. Now, to clarify, Dyson doesn’t believe in branding the way it’s practiced by many companies, where through sheer force of advertising, their heavily controlled (and often contrived) brand story is theoretically imprinted in your brain.  This isn’t so much branding as brain-washing. Let’s call it “brand-washing.”

But let’s go back to how our beliefs define our view of brands. We use beliefs as a heuristic short cut allowing us to operate efficiently in our world. We form beliefs so we don’t have to endlessly think through every single decision. Beliefs form based on our own experience, but they are also formed based on what we’re exposed to. All this input gets synthesized into a reasonably coherent and remarkably resilient belief. Once in place, this belief guides our action.

So, from our perspective, a brand can be defined as what the buyer believes a brand to be.  In the ad community, there is much debate about the definition of a brand. But, in the final analysis, the only definition of brand that matters is the one that rests in the mind of the buyer. All else are simply inputs into that final mental model, which is created solely by the customer.

James Dyson believes the best of those paths is by producing great products and then letting them speak for themselves. If you create products that consistently exceed expectations, that is enough to build an authentic and enduring brand belief. It’s hard to argue with that logic, and, in fact, it’s what P&G called the Second Moment of Truth with consumers: their experience when your product is in their hands. In this definition, brand is intimately coupled with the product itself.

But, if Dyson is right, why is there an advertising industry at all? Even Dyson buys ads to sell vacuum cleaners. This brings us to the second piece that I saw in the past week. It was a report out of Forrester called the Facebook Factor. This is a bit of a tangential detour, so bear with me.

The report posits that we can now quantify the value of a Facebook “like.” The reasoning is fairly simple. If you add a few questions to a typical customer survey, you can start to quantify the correlation between someone liking you on Facebook and subsequent purchasing of your product. But, as Forrester points out in the report, there is a correlation/causation trap here that could lead to many marketers making the wrong conclusion.

If you try to equate people who felt motivated to “like” you on Facebook with likelihood to purchase, you run the risk of mistaking correlation for causation. People didn’t buy your product as a result of “liking” you on Facebook.  The Facebook “like” came as a result of a positive “belief” about your brand. It was an effect, not a cause. At best, the Facebook Factor should be considered as nothing more than a leading indicator of brand preference.

But many marketers will confuse cause and effect. They will believe that driving Facebook “likes” will drive higher brand loyalty.  This is where brand and product can potentially become decoupled. Here, once marketers start assigning a value to a Facebook “like” based on Forrester’s methodology, they will start regarding Facebook “likes” as the end goal, trusting in the mistaken belief that a Facebook “like” will always correlate positively to purchase behavior.

Once this decoupling happens, the value of the Facebook “like” starts to erode. The motivation for the “like” often has little to do with a positive brand experience. It’s driven by a promotion or campaign that has just one aim: to drive as many likes as possible. From the customer’s perspective, it’s easy to hit the “like” button. They have no skin in the game. There is no belief behind the action.

In the end, I believe Dyson’s definition of brand is the more authentic one. It goes back to the very roots of branding, which was a reassurance to buyers that they were buying what they believed they were buying.

Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/174966/brand-beliefs-and-the-facebook-factor.html#ixzz2ik9IjRDB

Believing is Seeing

First published May 10, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In his book “The Believing Brain,” Michael Shermer spends several hundred pages exploring just how powerful beliefs are in forming our view of the world. Beliefs affect not just what we think, but they literally filter what we see and do. And, once in place, beliefs tend to be stubbornly unshakeable. We will go to great extents to defend our beliefs with rationalizations that are often totally or partially fabricated. As Shermer says, “Beliefs come first, explanations for beliefs follow.”

In the world of consumerism, this becomes important in any number of ways. For one, we have beliefs about brands, both positive beliefs and negative ones. And, as previous neuro-research has shown, those beliefs can dramatically alter how we sense the world. In a study at Baylor University, Dr. Read Montague found that the reason Coke devotees are so loyal has almost nothing to do with the actual taste, and much more to do with the Coke brand and what it says about them as people. It’s not the taste of Coke we love; it’s the idea of Coke.

A few weeks ago, I saw a press release from another study that takes this concept even further. The implications for understanding consumer decision-making are dramatic. In the study, Ming Hsu from the University of California, Berkeley, conducted an fMRI test of individuals participating in a multi-strategy economic investment game. As they made decisions based on the actions of their opponents, the parts of the brain that were firing were recorded.

Games of this sort require that the participants learn from events and adjust their strategies according. Here’s an excerpt from the media release: “The researchers focused on two types of learning processes. So-called ‘reinforced-based learning’ (RL) operates through trial and error. In contrast, more sophisticated ‘belief-based learning’ requires decision-makers to anticipate and respond to the actions of others. The researchers computed the areas of the brain where activity tracks these two types of learning. In addition, they discovered that the prefrontal cortex is an area that processes learning about others’ beliefs. The same area also predicts an individual’s propensity to engage in either belief learning or simply RL.”

This is interesting. Reinforced learning is completely reactive in nature. It’s learning after the fact. But if that was the only way we learned, we wouldn’t survive long. So the brain needs to adapt a proactive learning framework, and that framework relies on beliefs as its primary construct. We act based on what we believe the best outcome will be, and alter as necessary based on the success or failure of our decisions.

Now, if we were purely rational and empirical in the way we form those beliefs, this would seem to be logical way to live our lives. But, as we’ve seen, our beliefs are often anything but rational. They are usually formed with little thought or input, and once formed, tend to resolutely remain in place, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. If you think I’m exaggerating, consider this: 55% of Americans believe in angels, 39% believe in evolution, 36% believe in global warming and 34% believe in ghosts. I’ll leave it you to decide which of those stats you find most troubling.

The other note in the above excerpt that’s interesting is where this belief mechanism sits in the brain: the prefrontal cortex. This, by the way, was the same area of the brain that lit up in Montague’s test when his subjects knew they were drinking Coke. It’s the one part of the brain that really makes us who we are — quite literally, in fact.

Even in something as fleeting and supposedly unemotional as using a search engine, I’ve seen firsthand the powerful impact a strong brand belief can have. It physically alters what we see on the page of results. We’re just getting preliminary results from our own neuro-scanning study, done with Simon Fraser University, and it appears that looking for a favored brand affects how quickly we can find relevant information, how much time we spend looking at it (counterintuitively, we actually spend less time engaging with favored brands) and how easily distracted we are by other information on the page.

Truly, in consumerism, as in all areas of our lives, our beliefs determine how we see and sense the world around us.

 

The “Field of Dreams” Dilemma

First published May 3, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

There’s a chicken and an egg paradox in mobile marketing. Many mobile sites sit moldering in the online wilderness, attracting few to no visitors. The same could be said for many elaborate online customer portals, social media outposts or online communities. Somebody went to the trouble to build them, but no one came. Why?

Well, it could be because no one thinks to go to the trouble to look for them, just as no one expects to find a ball diamond in the middle of an Iowa cornfield. It wasn’t until the ghosts of eight Chicago White Sox players, banned for life from playing the game they loved, started playing on the “Field of Dreams” that anyone bothered to drive to Ray Kinsella’s farm.  There was suddenly a reason to go.

The problem with many out-of–the-way online destinations is that there is no good reason to go. Because of this, we make two assumptions:

–       If there is no good reason for a destination to exist, then the destination probably doesn’t exist. Or,

–       If it does exist, it will be a waste of time and energy to visit.

If we jump to either of these two conclusions, we don’t bother looking for the destination. We won’t make the investment required to explore and evaluate. You see, there is a built-in mechanism that makes a “Build it and they will come” strategy a risky bet.

This built-in mechanism comes from behavioral ecology and is called the “marginal value theorem.” It was first identified by Eric Charnov in 1976 and has since been borrowed to explain behaviors in online information foraging by Peter Pirolli, amongst others. The idea behind it is simple: We will only invest the time and effort to find a new “patch” of online information if we think it’s better than “patches” we already know exist and are easy to navigate to.  In other words, we’re pretty lazy and won’t make any unnecessary trips.

This cost/benefit calculation is done largely at a subconscious level and will dictate our online behaviors. It’s not that we make a conscious decision not to look for new mobile sites or social destinations. But unbeknownst to us, our brain is already passing value judgments that will tend to keep us going down well-worn paths. So, if we are looking for information or functionality that would be unlikely to find in a mobile site or app, but we know of a website that has just what we’re looking for and time is not a urgent matter, we’ll wait until we’re in front of our regular computer to do the research. We automatically disqualify the mobile opportunity because our “marginal value” threshold has not been met.

The same is true for social sites. If we believe that there is a compelling reason to seek out a Facebook page (promotional offers, information not available elsewhere) then we’ll go to the trouble to track it down. Otherwise, we’ll stick to destinations we know.

I believe the marginal value theorem plays an important role in defining the scope of our online worlds. We only explore new territory when we feel our needs won’t be met by destinations we already know and are comfortable with.  And if we rule out entire categories of content or functionality as being unlikely to adapt well to a mobile or social environment (B2B research in complex sales scenarios being one example) then we won’t go to the trouble to look for them.

I should finish off by saying that this is a moving target. Once there is enough critical mass in new online territory to reset visitor expectations, you’ve increased the “richness” of the patch to the point where the “marginal value” conditions are met and the brain decides it’s worth a small investment of time and energy.

In other words, if Shoeless Joe Jackson, Chick Gandil, Eddie Cicotte, Lefty Williams, Happy Felsch, Swede Risberg, Buck Weaver and Fred McMullin all start playing baseball in a cornfield, than it’s probably worth hopping on the tractor and head’n over to the Kinsella place!

Wonder What They’re Doing on Captiva?

First published April 26, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I kind of feel like a kid that stayed home while the rest of his friends headed off to summer camp at Lake Winnigapahaha. I just know they’re having more fun than I am.

To really drive it home, my friend Ken Fadner, the publisher of MediaPost, sent me a picture the other day of the launch of the Search Insider Summit on wonderful Captiva Island. “Missing you” was Ken’s postscript.

Awww… I miss you too, Ken!

You’ll forgive me if I feel rather possessive of the Search Insider Summit. For the last several of them, I’ve been the programming chair and emcee. Last year, I handed the reins over to the very capable team at MediaPost, but I still feel like I’m missing my left arm. In the past few weeks, as the event was drawing nearer, I even had “phantom” pains. I’d jolt upright, worrying about a keynote canceling or irresolvable scheduling conflicts, only to remember that it’s now someone else’s worry.

I had to give this year’s event a miss due to scheduling conflicts, but I also felt that for myself, and the event, it was probably time to explore new territory. I was proud of what we had accomplished the Summit. I still believe it is a one-of-a-kind search event: smart, strategic and small enough to be intimately social. The MediaPost team always does an incredible job matching the onstage content with plenty of opportunities to have fun and meet other attendees.

I also loved the event because for two weeks each year, it plugged me into the industry in a way that I just haven’t found elsewhere. I could reconnect with people who are just damned smart and spend a good amount of time thinking about where we’re going and how we’re going to get there.  That, perhaps more than anything else, is what I miss the most.

I’ve had the opportunity in the last year or so to start thinking about what my life will be “post-search.” That was another reason why I decided to step down from the Summit stage. I was recently at a conference where a speaker asked everyone who’d been in this industry for “at least a year” to raise their hands. Almost every hand when up.

Then he said, “At least three years.” Several hands went down.

“At least five years.” About a third of the hands stayed up.

“At least 10 years.” I was one of three hands that stayed up.  The speaker mercifully stopped there, but it was at that point I realized I’ve been doing this for almost 20 years.  Yeesh! Twenty years is a long time to be doing anything, let alone something as dynamic and exhausting as search. I’ve loved every minute of it, but still, that’s a hell of a lot of minutes — somewhere around 6 million by my reckoning, allowing a little down time for sleeping.

So, I’ll be thinking of you all in Captiva. I’ll be wondering what you’re talking about, over the refreshments consumed on Sunset Beach. I’ll miss the insights, both professional and otherwise, that seemed to happen on the dolphin & dinner cruise. And I’ll miss connecting with the smartest group of Search Insiders I know.

Search and the Age of “Usefulness”

First published April 19, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

There has been a lot of digital ink spilled over the recent changes to Google’s algorithm and what it means for the SEO industry. This is not the first time the death knell has been rung for SEO. It seems to have more lives than your average barnyard cat. But there’s no doubt that Google’s recent changes throws a rather large wrench in the industry as a whole. In my view, that’s a good thing.

First of all, from the perspective of the user, Google’s changes mark an evolution of search beyond a tool used to search for information to one used by us to do the things we want to do. It’s moving from using relevance as the sole measure of success to incorporating usefulness.

The algorithm is changing to keep pace with the changes in the Web as a whole. No longer is it just the world’s biggest repository of text-based information; it’s now a living, interactive, functional network of apps, data and information, extending our capabilities through a variety of connected devices.

Google had to introduce these back-end changes. Not to do so would have guaranteed the company would have soon become irrelevant in the online world.

As Google succeeds in consistently interpreting more and more signals of user intent, it can become more confident in presenting a differentiated user experience. It can serve a different type of results set to a query that’s obviously initiated by someone looking for information than it does to the user who’s looking to do something online.

We’ve been talking about the death of the monolithic set of search results for years now. In truth, it never died; it just faded away, pixel by pixel. The change has been gradual, but for the first time in several years of observing search, I can truthfully say that my search experience (whether on Google, Bing or the other competitors) looks significantly different today than it did three years ago.

As search changes, so do the expectations of users. And that affects the “use case” of search. In its previous incarnation, we accepted that search was one of a number of necessary intermediate steps between our intent and our ultimate action. If we wanted to do something, we accepted the fact that we would search for information, find the information, evaluate the information and then, eventually, take the information and do something with it. The limitations of the Web forced us to take several steps to get us where we wanted to go.

But now, as we can do more of what we want to online, the steps are being eliminated. Information and functionality are often seamlessly integrated in a single destination. So we have less patience with seemingly superfluous steps between us and our destination. That includes search.

Soon, we will no longer be content with considering the search results page as a sort of index to online content. We will want the functionality we know exists served to us via the shortest possible path. We see this beginning as answers to common information requests are pushed to the top of the search results page.

What this does, in terms of user experience, is make the transition from search page to destination more critical than ever. As long as search was a reference index, the user expected to bounce back and forth between potential destinations, deciding which was the best match. But as search gets better at unearthing useful destinations, our “post-click” expectations will rise accordingly.  Whatever lies on the other side of that search click better be good. The changes in Google’s algorithm are the first step (of several yet to come) to ensure that it is.

What this does for SEO specialists is to suddenly push them toward considering a much bigger picture than they previously had to worry about. They have to think in terms of a search user’s unique intent and expectations. They have to understand the importance of the transition from a search page to a landing page and the functionality that has to offer. And, most of all, they have to counsel their clients on the increasing importance of “usefulness” — and how potential customers will use online to seek and connect to that usefulness.  If the SEO community can transition to that role, there will always be a need for them.

The SEO industry and the Google search quality team have been playing a game of cat and mouse for several years now. It’s been more “hacking” than “marketing” as SEO practitioners prod for loopholes in the Google algorithm. All too often, a top ranking was the end goal, with no thought to what that actually meant for true connections with prospects.

In my mind, if that changes, it’s perhaps the best thing to ever happen in the SEO business.

Looking for the B2B Needle in the B2C Haystack

First published April 12, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

It’s not easy being a B2B marketer of the digital variety. Trust me. The problem is that 99% of the online world seems to be built specifically for the consumer market, and us B2B types have to try to divvy up the 1% that’s left. And that’s where it gets challenging.

The Tip of a hidden B2B Iceberg

One of the challenges is the lack of definition of the B2B market. It’s massive. But no one really seems to know just how big it is. When I was writing my book on B2B digital marketing, I tried in vain to try to find some reliable quantification of the immensity of the market, but I never did find a number that seemed fit for quoting. I had consumer market stats coming out of the ying-yang, but no one wanted to go on record to try to nail down the size of the business-to-business marketplace.

Consider this, though. For every consumer product that ends up in your hand, there is a long string of B2B transactions that precedes it. Some are materials and components directly incorporated into the end product, but many are indirect: equipment, services and supplies required to keep the long supply chain running.

Massive Fragmentation

If the B2B market is one massive iceberg that remains hidden, the challenges that face the B2B marketer start compounding when you consider that the market isn’t a monolithic one. Unlike the big consumer markets like automotive or consumer electronics, B2B markets are incredibly fragmented. The market lives in tiny little slivers spread across the online landscape. Suddenly our iceberg shatters into billions and billions of slippery little ice cubes.

This becomes apparent when you try to use a service like comScore or Hitwise to get market intelligence. Unless you’re GE, Siemens or Oracle, the vast majority of B2B websites have barely enough traffic to register in the datasets of these tools. Consumer markets tend to aggregate around a few landmark sites. But B2B traffic is scattered to the four winds. Even big B2B suppliers like 3M face the same problem in trying to obtain meaningful competitive data, once you go past the home page.

Consider that the main site, 3M.com, gets roughly the same traffic as just one site for a single PG consumer brand, Pampers.com. But within the 3m.site, no less than 70 different product divisions and hundreds of thousands of product lines are represented, from electronic components to liquid absorption materials that are used in, yes, those very same Pampers. If you try to slice and dice the traffic to get any meaningful intelligence, you soon find it would be easier to split an atom.

B2B Buyers look very much like B2C Buyers in the Data

Finally, you have the problem that when we have our B2B buying hat on, we still act much the same as when we wear our everyday consumer hat. We don’t suddenly change our search or online habits. For example, if you’re researching a possible solution for improving the water quality of a chain of coffee franchises, you’re likely to use pretty much the same keywords on Google that you might if you were looking for a home unit to fit under your kitchen sink.

When we search, we tend to start broad and only narrow down our searches when we have to. So when you look at search data available through Google or another tool, it becomes virtually impossible to segment B2B traffic from B2C. In the data, it often looks the same. So as you try to quantify opportunity, you start playing the B2B guessing game, where you arbitrarily discount the opportunity based on a WAG on what percentage could possibly be non-consumer in nature.

If you’re looking in a highly specialized product category, you might eventually use a B2B search tool like ThomasNet, GlobalSpec or KnowledgeStorm, but in all our research we have found that vast majority of B2B search activity happens in the same place as our consumer queries: namely Google, and to a lesser extent, Bing and the other alternatives.

Slim Pickens…

If you’re a consumer marketer, there is an increasingly rich set of digital marketing tools and data and targeting services to choose from. Everybody and their cousin are falling over themselves to cater to this market. But if you’ve decided to stake your flag on the B2B side of the divide, good luck! Only the foolhardy and brave seem to want to set foot here.

Reinventing AIDA

First published April 5, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, my column was about how branding differs between search and more traditional brand channels like TV and print. It came from a recent client conversation I had. Rob Schmults from Intent Media added a well-thought-out, on-the-mark comment that deserves a follow-up. There are three points in particular I want to dive deeper into.

“ I think part of the problem in attempting to do so is that branding is all too often an end in and of itself rather than a means.”

Absolutely. Most sales and marketing happens in dozens of disconnected siloes, with little thought about how the actions of one silo affect all the others. Each silo measures progress by its own metric and set its own agenda. The problem is that all these different initiatives are aimed at the same target, but there is little thought as to how each initiative can impact the prospect.

For the past year, I’ve been thinking about how to approach marketing by starting first with creating a common understanding of the buyer’s motivations and behaviors, and then mapping a decision landscape so we can begin to understand the path the buyer takes through it. Much of my writing over the past two years has explored various aspects of this landscape: things like the role of risk and reward, and how they affect the emotions drive our buying decisions.

If branding becomes disconnected and “an end in and of itself,” it starts to lose touch with the chain of “means” that translates brand awareness into action. I saw a particularly acute example of this in a recent meeting: a brand agency presented research showing each point of movement in its unaided brand awareness metric translated into X of additional revenue. I didn’t dispute the finding, as I believed it to be true. What was missing was the long chain of interdependent “means” taking us from there to here. It was like saying that each inch of rain translated into X increase of revenue at the local farmer’s market. We’re jumping from “A” to “Z” without worrying about the 24 intervening letters.

“SEM is clearly a means — it’s a step to driving a conversion event (typically a sale).”

As I mentioned last week, presence on the search page is very often a critical intermediate step between the lofty heights of brand-building and the nitty-gritty of bringing cash in the door. In fact, if you take the time to understand how search is typically used in the purchase process with your typical buyer, it typically falls into the “no-brainer” category, because the prospect has intent and is completely open to being persuaded. Which brings me to Rob’s next point:

“Branding has value, so the war Gordon describes doesn’t have to end with total victory and branding’s extinction.”

As effective as search is, it’s a channel with built-in limitations, including available inventory. If there is no awareness, there is no inventory. People can’t search for something they don’t know exists (at least, not yet). Branding creates awareness, which, if the dots are connected properly, eventually turns into intent. And when intent is present, search is very effective at converting that intent into action. The chain then is Awareness – Intent – Action, which is a variation on the venerable AIDA branding model: Attention – Interest – Desire – Action. If you combine the two you end up with Awareness – Interest – Desire – Intent – Action, or AIDIA. You need branding at the front end, to create awareness, spark interest and create desire. You need search at the back end to allow prospects to act on their intent and discover how to take action.

It’s interesting to note that the original AIDA model jumped all the way from desire to action without much explanation on how to get there. Given that two of the steps –“interest” and “desire” — seem pretty similar, it’s odd that there is such a huge chasm between the domain of branding and the ultimate transaction itself. The AIDA model was definitely biased towards the front end of the marketing process.

I think what digital has done, especially through search, is to provide much more granularity and clarity on the many steps you can take to get from desire to action. But, as Mr. Schmults reminds us, none of these steps is “an end unto itself.” They’re part of a journey. They depend on each other. And each is passed through by your prospects as they travel down the path of purchase.

To come full circle, that was my original point. I’m not calling for the abolition of branding. I’m just asking that we take the time to understand the journey our customers take, and be there at each step.

 

There is No Floor on Search Spending

First published March 29, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I was asked an interesting question by a client the other day:  “What is the minimum spending threshold for paid search? Below what level does it not make sense to invest anything?”

A little context is in order here. This same client had been through a vigorous round of budget discussions, where the digital and branding teams were fighting for the same bucket of dollars. They were trying, with almost no success, to compare effectiveness of digital and branding on a dollar-for-dollar basis. The brand team’s tactic was that they couldn’t give up any budget because they were already at minimum spending levels. Even a dollar less would drop them below the level required to hit the reach/frequency minimums dictated by the agency handling the media buys.

The answer, of course, is that there is no minimum when it comes to paid search. Each click you buy generates a potential lead. But the reasoning behind that answer speaks to the unique nature of search, when compared to traditional brand-building channels.

Online Branding is a Different Beast

Search vendors have been trying to prove the brand-building effects of search for years now. I’ve been personally involved in some of the earliest of these studies. And I’m here to tell you, branding is much different in an online environment than it is in the traditional worlds of print and electronic media.

When you use research to create a direct comparison between two different alternatives, you have to control for variables. If you don’t, the results are meaningless. If you’re trying to measure the brand lift of search, you have to use traditional brand awareness metrics — which, as I said, have significant methodological challenges.

The biggest challenge, identified by more sophisticated research approaches such as neuroscanning, is that most market research doesn’t really take into account how the brain works. And it’s here where the brand impact of search really can leave its more traditional counterparts in the dust.

The brain can interact with potential marketing messages in two different modes – a “bottom up” mode or a “top down” mode. The “bottom up” mode is how most traditional advertising works. It interrupts the brain, whatever it’s engaged with, and temporarily sidetracks the brain long enough to hopefully leave a “brand imprint” that will stick in long-term memory. Often, this is done at a subconscious level.

And therein lies the problem with most brand-awareness metrics. By their very nature, they have to engage the conscious brain and suddenly you’ve muddied the mental waters to such an extent that it’s almost impossible to get a true picture of the impression the brand left. Traditional brand impact research is a crapshoot, at best.

It’s this subconscious impact that has created the “minimum buy” hypothesis. If you don’t hit a potential target with enough impressions to make even a slight ding in their mental armor, you have wasted your entire budget. It’s the “Chinese water torture” approach to advertising.

But search engages the brain in a “top down” mode. We’re actively engaged with the task at hand, which means that no interruption is required to implant the brand impression. It’s immediately loaded into working memory, and we’re ready to act on it. That’s why there is no such thing as a minimum search spend. Each click bought has the potential to work, because there are no mental barriers to break down or attention to grab.

Sometimes the Truth Hurts

Ironically, in this particular budget discussion, the effectiveness of search turned out to be its downfall. We didn’t have the same “minimum spend” argument as the branding agency when it came to moving ad dollars from one budget to the other. But, when the dust settled, I took some solace in knowing that while we may have lost the battle, the effectiveness of search will eventually prove triumphant in the war.