People Trust Yahoo! and Google For the Brands

amigoro writes "Here's an interesting experiment: Copy Google results pages from four different e-commerce queries. Tell 32 test subjects who are going to evaluate the results that the results were from four different search engines: Google, MSN Live Search, Yahoo! and an in-house engine created for the study. Then see which ones they rate as the best. As it turns out Google and Yahoo! win hands down, proving that even on the Internet it's all about branding."

Comments

Branding and Reputation.

[twitter]

Isn't there a difference between branding and reputation?

Yes. Branding is something you buy with a billion dollars a month in advertising, like M$ does. Reputation is something you build with a quality product, like everyone else does. People can tell the difference.

Lies Seen Through.

[twitter]

Google good and MS bad, that type of thing. Then you throw in colors, images of happy people, etc, and you get a positive reaction. It may not be enough to surpress logical thinking, but these associations are powerful.

So isn't it encouraging that people are able to see through the butterflies, "reach your potential" and other obvious bullshit that M$ spends a billion dollars a month on? If the results were really all about marketing M$ would have dominated the results as much as they do advertising. Yahoo's presence may be do to them spending a little more than Google, but the bottom line is performance. Advertising dollars saturate at a rather low level of trust. When your performance sucks bad enough, the advertising can be counter productive - another in your face annoyance you would rather have left at work.

Marketing Realities.

[twitter]

an amazing AC troll blurt:

I can hardly get through a TV program without having to watch one of MS "switcher" adds trying to convince people to drop Google search in favor of live search. Oh wait, that was in your reality, what was I thinking.

That's called projection. You consider your own circumstances universal and project your reasoning onto others. The results are wrong because the circumstances are different. There are no TV ads in my reality, so what you were thinking was wrong.

It was also stupid because you could just go look up M$, Yahoo and Google's advertising budget. M$ is the least transparent of the bunch, but their quarterly reports back up the billion dollars a month figure. I doubt Yahoo, Google, Apple, Sun and IBM spend as much as a group.