Category Archives: Web Search

The Four Horsemen of the Consumer Behavior Apocalypse

First published March 25, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Right out of the gate, let’s assume that we all agree consumer behavior is in the throes of its biggest shift in history. And the cause is generally attributed to the Internet.

While I don’t disagree with this assessment, I believe there may be some misattribution when it comes to cause and effect. Did the Internet cause our consumer behavior to change? Or did it enable it to change? The distinction may seem like mere semantics, but there’s a fundamental difference here.

“Cause” implies that an outside force, namely the Internet, pushed us in a new direction that was different from the one we would have pursued had this new force not come along. “Enable” is a different beast, the opening of a previously locked door that allows us to pursue a new path of our own volition. I believe the latter to be true. I believe we weren’t pushed anywhere. We went there of our own free will.

Free Will? Or Hardwired Human Behavior?

But, even in my last statement, language again gets us in a sticky place. “Will” assumes it was a conscious and willful decision. I’m not sure this is the case. I suspect there were subconscious, hardwired behaviors that had a natural affinity for the new opportunities presented by the online marketplace.

For most of our recorded history, we have assumed that rational consideration and conscious will forms the basis of human thought. If we did seem programmed automatically to respond to certain cues, this was as a result of being conditioned by our environment, the classic Skinner black-box approach. But when we were on top of our game, we were carefully considering pros and cons, making consciously deliberated decisions. These were the forces that drove our society and our behaviors. This theory formed the basis of economics (Adam Smith’s Invisible hand), Cartesian logic, and most market research.

But in the last few decades, this view of rationality riding triumphant over human foibles has been brought into question. In particular, there were three concepts put forward by four academics that caused us to question what drove our behaviors. These folks uncovered deeper, subconscious routines and influences that lay buried beneath the strata of rational thought. And it’s these subconscious behaviors that I believe found the new online opportunities so enticing. Let’s spend a little time today looking at these four thinkers and the new paradigms they asked us to consider.

Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman – Prospect Theory

Adam Smith’s Invisible hand, driven by the wisdom of the market, has been presumed to be the ultimate economic governing factor. The assumption was that each of us, individually making rational economic decisions, would ultimately decide winners and losers and capitalism would stay alive and well.

But Tversky and Kahneman, in their paper on Prospect Theory, showed that the invisible hand might not always be guided by a decisive and logical mind. We all have significant hardwired cognitive biases that often cause us to make illogical economic choices. For example, if I offered you $1,000, with no questions asked, or a chance to win $2,500 based on a coin toss, you’d probably take the sure bet, even though mathematically, the odds for net gain are better with the coin toss.

Prospect Theory shot some holes in the previous theory of Expected Utility, a model where we carefully weighed the pros and cons of a potential purchase based on a return on investment model. Emotional framing and risk avoidance played a much bigger role than we suspected, handicapping our logic and often guiding us down non-rational paths. Tversky and Kahneman single-handedly found the new discipline of Behavioral Economics and changed our thinking in the process.

Herbert Simon – Bounded Rationality

Simon’s concept of Bounded Rationality superseded Kahneman and Tversky’s theory, but it dovetailed with it very nicely. Even if we are rationally engaged in a decision, Simon argued, we couldn’t possibly optimize it, especially in complex scenarios. There were simply too many factors to consider. So, we took “gut feeling” short cuts, which Simon called “satisficing,” a combination of satisfy and suffice. We short-listed our consideration set by using beliefs and instincts.

To make the satisficing short list is the goal of any brand campaign. At some point, logical weighing of pros and cons has to give way to calls based primarily on instinct.  And, as Kahneman and Tversky showed, those instinctive calls may well be based on irrational emotional biases.

George Akerlof – information Asymmetry

The last piece, and the one that really drove the online consumer revolution, is George Akerlof’s Information Asymmetry theory. Traditionally, there has been an imbalance of information between buyers and sellers, to the seller’s advantage. The seller always knew more about what they were selling than the buyer did. This made purchasing inherently risky.

With an absence of information, consumers created strong beliefs about brands as a way to guide their future buying decisions. Brand loyalty, whether rational or not, filled the void left by a lack of information. Manufacturers and retailers carefully controlled what information did enter the marketplace, pushing the positives and carefully suppressing the negatives.

These three concepts, intertwined, defined the psychological make-up of the market prior to the introduction of the Internet. In my next column, I’ll explore what happened when these behavioral powder kegs were exposed to the fanned flames of the digital marketplace.

Search and Our Online “Set Point”

First published March 18, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Derek Gordon’s piece on Siri this week gave concrete proof of what I’ve been saying about the transition of search from a destination to a utility. Consider the example Derek gave of Siri’s functionality:

make action-oriented queries into your iPhone like “find me a good French restaurant for two tonight.”  Using your iPhone’s location coordinates, it will search Yelp for positive reviews of restaurants in your area, find a reservation for the most popular one via OpenTable and ask if you’d like to confirm a reservation.  Once you’ve confirmed the time, Siri will book the reservation for you. 

Notice the words Derek uses: “search” Yelp, “find” a reservation, both as intermediate steps to the end goal, allowing you to take action. And the Siri interface sits between you and the sources of the information. It’s exactly this interposing of a layer of functionality between the information and the user that I was talking about two weeks ago when I said that Steve Ballmer was thinking about the future of the search revenue model.

An application like Siri is only as good as the number of things it can do. Functionality, not information, is the new promise of the Internet. As John Battelle said in a recent chat with me, we quickly adjusted to the fact that the Internet could make us smarter. Now we expect it to let us do things better and faster. Information is only a means to an end.

Our Online ‘Set Point’

University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman believes that we have a happiness “set point.” For example, winning a lottery doesn’t really make us happier in the long run. We just ratchet up our level of expectation to accommodate our new circumstance. I believe the same is true about our feelings towards advanced technology.

In the early days of the Internet, we were consistently amazed when we found information “out there.”  It seemed that no matter what we were looking for, with enough diligence, we could find some source for it. The Internet was one big information archive, and search was the key we used to unlock it. But as with happiness , we’re very quick to reset our expectations. Amazement quickly gives way to a sense of entitlement. We now accept the fact that the information is out there somewhere.  We now expect applications to gather it for us and present us with an opportunity to act on it.

The Road Ahead for Search

In a few short weeks, we’ll be gathering on Captiva Island in Florida to discuss where search is going. I believe a central theme will be this idea of search as a step towards usefulness.  We have reset our expectations and we need more from search. And this raises an interesting possibility. I have talked before about how Google became a habit for us. But habits only remain stable as long as they produce the expected results. Once we stop getting what we expect, we ready ourselves to break the habit and build a new one. It’s hard cognitive work, but we will undertake it if the payoff is worth it in terms of expected utility. As our expectations, fueled by glimpses of potential functionality through apps like Siri, are raised to a new set point, we will be less satisfied with the vanilla search experience offered by Google. This means, finally, we may be ready to break the Google Habit.

Google’s counter to that will be that Siri benefits from having a very focused purpose, supported through a dedicated interface and structured data. It’s impossible to match that functionality across all categories and use cases. Very true and very rational — but it doesn’t matter. If our online “set point” gets reset, our loyalty to Google will suffer. Suddenly, we won’t be satisfied anymore, because we believe something better is out there.

The Spring Search Insider Summit: Where is Search Going?

First published March 11, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In my last column, I talked about Steve Ballmer ruminating about the future of search. Steve isn’t the only guy thinking about this. A number of people I’ve talked to in the last few months have been pulling their crystal balls out and doing a little prognosticating about where searching as we know it might go in the future.

I think we (and by we, I mean anyone remotely connected to the search industry) all agree that we’re at the cusp of a sea-change in our world. Most everything we know will get swept along with this change: revenue models, our search experience, marketing strategies, the role of search agencies, the tools we use — and even the very platforms we use to launch our search.
One simply can’t overstate the importance of this. So, with another Search Insider Summit rapidly approaching, the folks at MediaPost and I have decided to turn the entire summit over to that one central question: Where is search going?

Those of you who have ever attended a Search Insider Summit know the basic premise: spirit a number of the smartest minds in search away to a fabulous location and let them share ideas for three-and-a-half packed days of brainstorming. This time around, on lovely Captiva Island in Florida, I want the future of search to be on the tips of everyone’s tongues.

And that’s where I need some help. I need passionate and compelling presenters who can “Captiva-te” our audience with their vision of where search is going. I’m looking for pitches around the central question. I’ve switched it up a little this time, dividing the primary question into six different sessions:

Where is the Core Technology Going? The engine that drives search is undergoing some significant tweaking, both in the labs of Microsoft and Google and in countless start-ups around the globe. How is the fundamental function of indexing and organizing information evolving?

Where is the User Interface Going? What will our search engines of the future look like? What is the next flavor of the 10 blue links? How will we query — and when we do, what will the results look like?

Where is the Search Experience Going? Already, we launch our searches from more and more places: mobile devices, entertainment screens, tablets and desktops. And the explosion of screens means the diversity will only continue to grow. How will the very act of searching change for us? And what will it mean for those of us doing the searching?

Where is Search Marketing Going? As search changes, the ways we use it as a marketing channel must also change. How will we adapt to the changing user experience and interface? What will our touch points with prospects who are searching for information look like in the future?

Where is the Search Marketing Industry Going? At past summits, we’ve talked a lot about how the search marketing industry has to change and adapt. Despite its rapid adoption and tremendous success, the search marketing industry is still in its relative infancy. Will stand-alone search agencies be part of the future marketing landscape? And if they are, what do we have to start learning to do — and what should we stop doing?

Where are Search Marketing Tools Going? One of the knocks against search is its lack of scalability. Tools have consistently scrambled to keep up with the changes and have made great strides in assisting the search marketer in keeping track of what is, by necessity, a tremendously granular management task. But what will those tools look like in the future?

If any of the above topics strike your passion, let us know. Send us a speaking pitch in the following format:

Introduction: One (short) sentence summarizing your pitch, along with the session you believe it fits into.

Description: No more than 300 words giving us more detail about what you want to speak about.

About Yourself: A little bit about you and why you’d make a compelling presenter on the Search Insider Summit stage.

Send all this along to my email: gord@enquiro.com and please cc my assistant: denise@enquiro.com. Time is short, so if you’re interested, please get your pitches in by next Tuesday.

Steve Ballmer and the Future of Search Revenues

First published March 4, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Steve Ballmer is an enthusiastic guy. As he climbed on stage with Danny Sullivan at SMX West, everyone was wondering how long it would be before he cranked up the volume and slipped into his typical Ballmeresque bombastic delivery. Steve didn’t disappoint. A few minutes into the interview, with Sullivan probing about Microsoft’s aspirations around search, Ballmer was yelling “Sell, Danny, don’t yell!” (ironic in the extreme) and roughhousing with poor Danny like a good-natured football coach having a little fun with the class math geek. I half expected Steve to give Sullivan a noogie.

I suspect there will be no shortage of coverage on the keynote and the areas explored. Ballmer was careful to tone down his enthusiasm about Bing with a realistic nod to Google’s current dominance. But there was one comment in particular that I want to explore a little further today. Ballmer made all the obligatory comments about us being very early in the game a search, an observation that has become rote in search interviews. And usually, that observation refers to the user experience, the functionality or the platform from which we search.  But Ballmer purposely singled out one area that is not generally talked about when we discuss the nascence of search — the revenue model.

The Crystallization of a Revenue Model

Search as it exists today proved to be the perfect crystallization of a revenue model, a beautifully simple evolution that had all the right pieces falling into place at just the right time. It was a rare occurrence in the messy and organic online world, one that Google capitalized on to the tune of several billion dollars. But it’s unrealistic to think that this crystallization of revenue opportunity can survive for long or morph into something equally universal, simple and effective.

Here’s what happened: Search solved a fundamental human need  — the need to access information. Google did search better than anyone else. All this searching happened in a small handful of places, with Google as the dominant destination. Much of this searching was for information that came from consumer intent.  And, because consumers were searching for information, sponsored messages could be informational in tone rather than overtly promotional. Search was a “click,” the natural and simple connection of burgeoning need with marketing opportunity.

It’s Not That Simple Anymore

But here’s what’s happening now: Search is not as simple as it was. Increasingly, our search activity is splintering over more platforms and through more interface layers. Search is going “under the hood,”  powering a number of different apps for a number of different needs. This means the ubiquitous and universal intersection point for search is going away. We’re demanding more from search — more functionality, more integration, more understanding of how we intend to use the information we seek. This raising of the bar of our expectations means it will become increasingly difficult for one interface to serve all those needs.

As we start doing more online — finding the functionality we need to take us not just from point A to B, but allowing us to continue on to C, D and even Z, with digital servants assisting with, or even allowing us to completely ignore, the interim steps — search will just be another piece of that functionality. This “usefulness” explosion is very unlikely to happen in one place. It will happen in thousands or millions of places. And search will be relegated from being an online destination to an online utility.

Google, Microsoft, and any other search provider, will lose the critical revenue-producing high ground, the touch point with the consumer, at least in the form it currently exists. This will require a rapid shift in revenue models, and I suspect it’s this impending shift that Ballmer was alluding to in his keynote. There will be revenue to be made — far more revenue, in fact. But Google and Microsoft may find themselves in the position of taking a much smaller slice of a much larger pie.

Maximizers vs. Satisficers: Why It’s Tough to Decide

First published February 18, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In last week’s column, I introduced the study from Wesleyan University about how decisiveness played out for a group of 54 university students as they chose their courses.  The student’s eye movements were tracked as they looked at a course comparison matrix.

Weighing all the Options vs Saying No

In the previous column, I talked about two different strategies: the compensatory one, where we weigh all the options, and the non-compensatory one, where we start eliminating candidates based on the criterion most important to us. Indecisive people tend to start with the compensatory strategy and decisive people go right for the linear approach.  I also talked about Barry Schwartz’s theory (in his book “The Paradox of Choice”) that indecisiveness can lead to a lot of anxiety and stress.

The biggest factor for indecisive people seems to be a fear of lost opportunity. They hate to turn away from any option for fear that something truly valuable lies down that path. Again, this is territory well explored in Tversky and Kahnemann’s famous Prospect Theory.

The Curse of the Maximizer

Part of the problem is perfectionism, identified by Schwartz as a strong corollary to anxiety caused by impending decisions. The Wesleyan research cites previous work that shows indecisive people tend to want a lot more information at hand before making any decisions. And, once they’ve gone to the trouble to gather that information, they feel compelled to use it. Not only do they use it, they try to use it all at once.

The Wesleyan eye tracking showed that the more indecisive participants went back and forth between the five different course attributes fairly evenly, apparently trying to weigh them all at the same time.  Not only that, they spent more time staring at the blank parts of the page. This indicated that they were trying to crunch the data, literally staring into space.  The maximizing approach to decision-making places a high cognitive load on the brain. The brain has to juggle a lot more information to try to come to an optimal decision.

Decisive people embrace the promise of “good enough,” known as satisficing. They are less afraid to eliminate options for consideration because the remaining choices are adequate (the word satisficing is a portmanteau of “satisfy” and “suffice”) to meet their requirements. They are quicker to turn away from lost opportunity. For them, decision-making is much easier. Rather than trying to juggle multiple attributes, they go sequentially down the list, starting with the attribute that is most important to them.

In the case of this study, this became clear in looking at the spread of fixations spread amongst the five attributes: time of the class, the instructor, the work load, the person’s own goals and the level of interest. For decisive people, the most important thing was the time of class. This makes sense. If you don’t have the time available, why even consider what the course has to offer? If the time didn’t work, the decisive group eliminated it from consideration. They then moved onto the instructor, the next most important criterion. And so on down the list.

Tick…Tick…Tick…

Another interesting finding was that even though indecisive people start by trying to weigh all the options to look for the optimal solution, if the clock is ticking, they often become overwhelmed by the decision and shift to a non-compensatory strategy by starting to eliminate candidates for consideration. The difference is that for the indecisive maximizers, this feels like surrender, or, at best, a compromise. For the decisive satisficers, it’s simply the way they operate. If the indecisive people are given the choice between delaying the decision and being forced to eliminate promising alternatives, they’ll choose to delay.

This sets up a fascinating question for search engine behavior: do satisficers search differently than maximizers? I suspect so. We’ll dive deeper into this question next week.

Undecided about Bing, the Decision Engine

First published January 28, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

OK, I admit it. Bing is starting to show some glimmering signs of promise. But I still have concerns — big ones.

I had the chance to chat with Stefan Weitz recently about where Microsoft wanted to take Bing. It’s hard not to get swept up in Weitz’ evangelism. Microsoft is trying to do some very impressive things with search: parse the ambiguity out of our language; stitch together disparate fragments of content into a whole that’s useful to the user; and present all this in a results format that informs and assists without requiring extensive tweaking on the part of the user.

We all love to hate the evil empire, but let’s be fair. Microsoft has humbled itself dramatically, and the company is sincerely trying to do a good job with Bing. The team at Redmond is getting used to their unexpected position as the underdog and, based on my conversation with Weitz, they’re beginning to relish the challenge that comes from playing David to Google’s Goliath.

My quibble, however — and it’s not an insignificant one — is that Bing needs to step up its differentiation. Weitz said in the interview that Bing first wanted to at least match Google at its own game: algorithmic search. I understand this logic, but there are some other things to consider here.

To Break a Habit, You have to Break the Pattern

For Bing to gain market share against Google, it has to break a habit. And to break a habit, you have to force someone out of his or her rut. There are two ways to do that. One, you change the route they have to take so they have to consciously steer back into the rut. Secondly, you give them an alternative that’s so much better than the rut, they’re willing to do the heavy mental lifting required to consciously shut down their “autopilot”-driven, rut-seeking routines when they start to play out.

Make no mistake; habits are notoriously tough things to break. Our brain has a box-load of nasty little tricks it will employ to keep habits in place, because habits require less work from the brain than actually thinking our way through things. Our brains are inherently lazy (or, if you prefer, efficient). There’s no such thing as breaking a habit a “little bit” or breaking a habit “now and then.” You either break a habit or you don’t.

So what does this mean for Bing? The Bing philosophy right now is that for the vast majority of searches, it delivers what is basically a Bing-ized version of Google. And then, for some select searches, it delivers a more differentiated search result. For example, search for “Bristol England” on Bing and Google. On Bing, you’ll get what’s called a Task Page, tailored to be more useful for those trying to accomplish things related to Bristol: the current weather, favorite attractions and the official tourism site. This is Bing’s flavor of a decision-based guide. This, theoretically, is what makes Bing a “decision engine” rather than a “search engine.”

But now go to the Google results page. While it may be hidden in a more traditional presentation of results, still, most of the same information is there. I’d give Bing the edge from a usefulness perspective, but it’s not a knock-out. It’s more of a 12 round split decision.

Lets try another example:  the much-cited Farecast search. True, the latest airfares from Farecast are useful, but real interactivity is still one click away at Bing Travel. Bing is dipping a rather tentative toe in the waters of usefulness. Right now, Google isn’t matching the Farecast functionality, but even with its standard search results, the perceivable difference to the user is not all that great.

I feel Bing is still trying to match Google rather than draw away from it. And to break a habit, you have to put a lot of distance between yourself and the habitual choice. You don’t abandon one rut for a similar rut headed to the same basic destination. What’s the point of that?

Search One-Up-Manship

There is some good news in all this. From the user perspective, I’ve seen more helpful features unveiled on both Google and Bing than I’ve seen in a long, long time. As Bing starts to experiment with more useful features, Google has been consistently matching it. And this brings up another fatal flaw in Bing’s strategy. It’s pretty easy for Google to keep a watchful eye on Bing for useful innovations. As long as those innovations are incremental in nature, Google can quickly match them. Bing will never build up the degree of differentiation needed to break a habit. But the byproduct is pretty compelling for the user. No matter whether you’re using Google or Bing, the pace of innovation has picked up dramatically.

In the Bing-Google battle, the user seems to be the big winner so far.

Interview with Stefan Weitz posted at SNL

Apologies for my brief hiatus from blogging last week. I was in Santa Cruz for an extended weekend with my wife, which was fabulous…thanks for asking. Also got a chance to catch Wicked in SF. It was a great way to kick off the weekend.

In between Defying Gravity and bird watching on the California coast, I did get a chance to post Part One of an Interview with Microsoft’s Stefan Weitz on Search Engine Land. It was the kick off of a series I’m doing on where Search goes from here. Stefan and I talked mainly about Microsoft’s “Decision Engine” strategy and what Microsoft currently thinks is “broken” about search. An interview with Stefan can’t help but be interesting, so I encourage you to check it out over at Just Behave.

In the meanwhile, I’m still hopping across the country, but am hoping to get a few new posts done on the Psychology of Entertainment in between plane rides and racking up Hilton HHonors points. Why do I feel a compelling kinship to George Clooney’s character in Up in the Air?

The World’s Intentions at Our Fingertips

First published January 7, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

We’ve made Google a verb. What does that mean? Well, for one thing, it means we have a better indication of prospect intent than ever before. Google (or any search engine) becomes the connector between our intent and relevant online destinations. John Battelle called Google the database of intentions and predicted that it would become hugely important. Battelle’s call was right on the money, but we still haven’t felt the full import of it. Our tapping into our zeitgeist (defined as the general intellectual, moral and cultural climate of an era) is usually restricted to a facetious review of the top 10 search terms of the year.

Keep Your Eye on Intent

A couple of columns ago I indicated that consumer intent was one of the most important things to watch in the shift of advertising. Intention changes the rules of engagement with advertising. It switches our perception of ads from that of an interruption we’re trying to avoid to that of valuable information we’re looking for. With intention in place, the success of an ad depends not on its ability to hijack our attention, but rather on its ability to deliver on our intention. Ads no longer have to intrude on our consciousness; all they have to do is inform us.

To this point, some 15 years into the practice of search marketing, the majority of our efforts have been restricted to effectively meeting the intentions of our prospects. And, to be honest, we still have a long way to go to get that right. Landing page experiences still fall far short of visitor expectations. Search ad copy is still irrelevant in a large percentage of cases. Even when the keywords used give a clear signal of intent (unfortunately, a fairly rare circumstance) most marketers come up short on delivering an experience that’s relevant and helpful. Poor search marketing is the reason quality scores exist.

The Keynote Avinash Never Gave

But there’s an immense store of untapped potential lying in this “database of intentions.” When Avinash Kaushik did the keynote at last month’s Search Insider Summit, he intended to touch on three topics. Unfortunately, the third topic had to be dropped because of time limitations. He talked about attribution models and the Long Tail. The third topic was to be the use of search as a source of intelligence. Kaushik was going to explore how to leverage the “database of intentions” to better inform all our marketing efforts.

When it comes to tapping into this extraordinarily rich source of intelligence, even search marketers are slow to realize the potential. And we’re the ones that supposedly “get” the importance of search. For more traditional marketers, most are completely unaware that such a thing even exists. I believe two things are holding us back from effectively mining the “database of intentions” – the isolation of search marketing within an organization, and a lack of tools to effectively mine the intelligence.

SEM is an Island

Search marketing lives as an isolated island within most organizations. It lives apart from the main marketing department — as well as the day-to-day pulse of the corporation. The bigger the company, the more true this is. That means that the one department that has a hope in hell of understanding the importance of all these collected searches has little or no voice in the overall marketing strategy. All those signals of customer intent — indeed, the best barometer of consumer sentiment ever built — lies locked away behind the imaginary door of the search marketing cubicle.  The traditional marketing folks have no idea that this crystal ball, offering a real-time view of the goals, thoughts and aspirations of their target market, even exists, let alone how to use it.

Wanted: Better Mining Tools

Even the relatively minimal efforts Google has made to provide tools to dig into this data have proven to be amazingly valuable for marketers. Google Trends and its bigger brother, Google Insights, provide a glimpse into the power of Google’s query database. Unfortunately, these tools provide a rather anemic interface, considering the wealth of information that could be gleaned. Privacy is one stumbling block, but surely we could have more powerful tools to examine and slice the data, even in anonymized, aggregated form. I would love to hitch the sophistication of a comScore-type application to Google’s back-end data.

Battelle said this about the Database of Intentions: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.

Isn’t about time that we marketers clued into it?

How Google Became a Verb

First published December 31, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

It’s probably because I’m just finishing a book (The Stuff of Thought) by famed linguist and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, but grammar has been on my mind more than usual lately. And in particular, I was fascinated by how we use Google in our language. Google, of course, has been “genericided” – the fate that falls on brands that lose their status as a protected brand name and become a generic term in our vocabulary. This causes much chagrin with Google’s legal and marketing team. What is more interesting however is the way we’ve taken Google into our lexicon.

Of Nouns and Verbs

Most brands, when they get incorporated into our language, become nouns. Kleenex, aspirin, escalators, thermoses and zippers all went down similar paths on the road to becoming common terms that described things. It might interest you to know, for instance, that in Japan, staplers are known as Hotchkisses (or technically, hochikisu). Google, however, is different. The word Google doesn’t replace the noun “search engine,” it replaced the act of searching. We made googling a verb. And that is a vital difference. We don’t call all search engines Google. But we do refer to our act of searching as googling.

More than this, we made Google a transitive verb – “I googled it”. That means I (the subject) used Google (the verb) to do something with it (the object). Pinker says the way we use words betrays the way we think about the world. Verbs are the lynchpins of our vocabulary, because we use them to explain how we interact with our physical world. And transitive verbs, in particular, act as connectors between us and the world. I once said that search was the connector between intent and content. The enshrining of Google as a verb reflects this. The act of googling connects us with information.

Sampling the Outside World through Google

But the use of Google as a transitive verb also gives us a glimpse into how we regard the gathering of the content we Google. Transitive verbs tend to reflect a transfer from the outside to the inside, a consumption of the external, either physically or through our senses: I drank it, I ate it, I saw it, I heard it, I felt it. In that sense, their use is personal and fundamental. “I googled it” gives us a sense of metaphorical transference – the consumption of information.

So, what does this mean? If you look at the role of our language, there is something of fundamental importance happening here. Language is our collection of commonly accepted labels that allow us to transfer concepts from our heads into the heads of others. These labels are not useful unless they mean the same thing to everyone. When I say thermos, you know instantly what I mean. Your visualization of it might be slightly different than mine (a Batman thermos from grade 5 is the image that I currently have) but we can be confident that we’re thinking about the same category of item. We have a shared understanding.

Speaking a Common Language

This need for commonality is the threshold that new words must cross before they become part of common language. This means that critical mass becomes important. Enough of us have to have the same concept in our heads when we use the same label before that label becomes useful. Generally, when technology introduces a concept that we have to find a new label for, we try a few variations on for size before we settle on one that fits. Common usage is the deciding vote.

With things like new products, the dominant brand has a good chance of becoming the commonly used label. Enough of us have experience with the brand to make it a suitable stand in for the product category. We all know what’s meant by the word escalator. And new product categories creep up fairly regularly, forcing us to agree on a common label. In the last decade or two, we’ve had to jam a lot of new nouns in our vocabulary: ATM’s, fax, browser, Smartphones, GPS, etc. Few of these categories have had enough single brand domination to make that brand the common label. Apple has probably come the closest, with iPod often substituting for MP3 player.

The material nature of our world means that we’re forever adding new nouns to our vocabulary. There are always new things we have to find words for. That’s why one half of all the entries in the Oxford dictionary are nouns. The odds of a brand name becoming a noun are much greater, simply because the frequency is higher. And by their nature, nouns live apart from us. They are objects. We are the subjects.

The Rarity of a Verb

But verbs are different. Only one seventh of dictionary entries are verbs. Verbs live closer to us. And the introduction of a new verb into our vocabulary is a much rarer event. This makes the critical mass threshold for a verb more difficult to pass than for a noun. First of all, enough of us have to do the action to create the need for a common label. Secondly, it’s rare for one brand to dominate that action so thoroughly. The birth of googling as a verb is noteworthy simply because so many of us were doing something new at the same place.

Why did I share this linguistic lesson with you? Again, it’s because so many of us are doing something at the same place. New verbs emerge because we are doing new things. We do new things because something drives us to do them. That makes it a fundamental human need. And to have that fundamental human need effectively captured by one brand – to the point that we call the act by the brand’s name – offers a rare opportunity to catalogue human activity in one place. One of the most underappreciated aspects of search marketing is the power of search logs to provide insight into human behavior. That’s what my first column of 2010 will be about.

And, just to leave you with a tidbit for next week, currently another brand name is on the cusp of becoming a verb (although it’s exact proper form is still being debated). The jury is still being assembled, but Twitter could be following in Google’s footsteps.

The Shape of Marketing: 2010 and Beyond

First published December 24, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

You’re going the get the inevitable recap and prediction columns as the days of 2009 dwindle. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about the shift in marketing. It seems to me that there are three fundamental drivers of this shift. I’m going to spend today talking a little bit more about them, as I believe these are the bearing points we have to pay attention to.

Influence

It’s somewhat odd, but for something as old as advertising, we still have remarkably little information about how it actually influences us. What are the exact buttons that are pushed by advertising? We’ve tried to come up with metrics that measure influence, like brand recall and affinity, but they have generally proven to have little to do with what we actually do in the real world. The ARF have been continuously pressing to introduce engagement as a new cross-channel metric, but the work of at least some academics have shown that even engagement might not be an indicative measure.  The whole question of subliminal influence has generally been pushed under the carpet because of the tainted perception going back to the ’50s and Vance Packard.

But the fact is, as we learn more about the mind and how we really make decisions, we find that the role of advertising in influencing our purchases is perhaps not so clear as we first imagined. The ability to quantify influence still evades us, but the call for measurable and accountable advertising is louder than ever. As you move closer to the purchase, measurement becomes easier. But when you move backwards to the earlier influencers, the picture becomes much murkier. I think the trails we leave online will help shed light on influence, along with the explosion of research being done through new neuro-research methods.

Participation

Perhaps the biggest shift in the marketplace has been the balancing of George Akerlof’s information asymmetry. We spend a lot of time talking about consumers being in control. I think this is taking it too far. What is true is that marketing is now about meeting the consumer halfway. Consumers have access to more information, not all of which is supplied by the manufacturer. Think of the difference between a church and a community hall to understand what the new marketplace looks like.  We have taken brands from behind the pulpit and forced them to sit down at a table and talk to us. This is new territory for the brands, as they learn that listening is at least as important as talking. Preaching has given way to participating. And when you think of it that way, this whole question of control becomes somewhat irrelevant. Do you control most of your conversations?

Intention

The last is a big one, and it has really driven digital marketing, particularly search. A consumer’s intention has always been an overlooked part of most marketing programs. Intent was assumed but wasn’t really integral to marketing strategies. The only place intent played a part was in directory advertising (such as the Yellow Pages) — and when you’re the only game in town, you don’t have to spend much time refining the rules.

Search changed all that. We have become a “just in time” information economy, where intent drives huge volumes of very focused consumer activity as they gather required information. Harvesting intent at the end of the process has been relatively simple — a good search placement and an effective landing page are all that’s sometimes needed. It becomes much more difficult when intent is further removed from the end transaction. Intents can change as you move through a long consideration process, shifting from gathering information to checking prices to short-listing your alternatives to actually placing an order. Understanding intent and meeting it effectively are the challenges that separate the great search marketers from the bottom-feeders

These three drivers are the forces that are changing marketing. When I look at them for commonalities, one comes to mind: in each, we have to get better at knowing the people on the other side of the transaction. We have to spend more time understanding what influences our prospects’ buying decisions, how we can participate effectively in the process and how we can help satisfy their intent. All of this depends on us getting to know our prospects better. It’s not a “market”; it’s dozens — or hundreds, thousands or millions — of individuals. And we have to learn to have conversations with each of them.