Ask Has the Answer

Search engine upstart Ask might have the right idea for building market share and profits, but only after years of aggressively pursuing the wrong ones.

The silver bullet strategy?  Start attracting segments of searchers based on particulars of place, topic, or detailed requirements.  Or at least that's what I think it is going to do.

The news from Ask has been pretty consistently inconsistent ever since IAC bought it in 2005.  It used to be called "Ask Jeeves," and featured a logo of a butler holding a serving plate.  I seem to remember that it was the search engine into which you could comfortably type a complete sentence, literally asking it a question.  Get it?  Ask.

The brand numbnuts completely destroyed this memorable (and actionable) branding, because they felt the company shouldn't target  "novices" ( i.e. most consumers).  It scrapped the Jeeves connection, and then plowed $123 million in advertising to, er, novices, with the biggest chunk going to TV spots.

Its print ads were either incomprehensible, or touted some abstraction of its service that read like a case for one oxygen molecule providing a better breathing experience than another.

Ask's share of the search market hovers around 4.3%.  Google's has grown to 58.4, and it has spent on marketing about a fourth of what Ask did to get it.

My hopefulness stems from the appointment of Jim Safka as Ask's new CEO.  He comes from running Match.com, which he successfully built by understanding who was using the service, why, when, from where, and then got busy finding more of those people.

This is smart business, and forms the basis for smart branding in the search business.  Here’s why:

• The world doesn't need a handful of generic search engines.  I'd argue that most consumers "choose" Google by default, if not wholly unconsciously.  There just aren't awfully noticeable differences between search results on one engine or another
• Most searches take more than a few tries before users are happy with the results.  Lots of them are abandoned entirely
• There's lots of talk about engines (like Google) getting smarter at guessing what people are looking for.  But this innovation presumes that people know what they want in the first place
• It doesn’t help that all search interfaces are clumsy, so there's a UI hurdle, too: not only do people not know what they're looking for, but most searchers really don't know how to phrase, parse, or otherwise tell the computer terminal what it is they’re trying to do anyway
• The added fact that the engines tee-up paid and free results makes it all ever-more confusing.
• So I'd wager that achieving differentiation on functionality isn’t going to come from providing better answers, but rather from helping users ask better questions

Ask.  Get it?

It could do this via any number of strategies:

• Developing a series of vertical search functions that made Ask the go-to destination for, say, travel searchers, or shoe shoppers
• Creating a new UI that simplified the search process.  Could this be separate fields for each word (to this day, most people don't know what, if any, impact using a comma, semi-colon, or other punctuation will have, or if putting a phrase within quotation marks changes the search parameters from those of a mere series of words)?  How about some better customer service that helped searchers (automated or off-shored)?
• Inventing some better delineation between paid and organic search results.  The whole point now is to confuse the two, contrary to what Google, Yahoo, or the other biggies might claim.  Imagine if Ask could go to a dedicated group of searchers, deliver a uniquely useful interface to them, and provide greater credibility of the fairness of the results it delivers?  All it has to to is to shelve the inane branding stuff it’s been throwing at consumers, and focus on the who, what, where, when, and why that will give it a real chance to differentiate itself.

I think that's where Safka is going.  "We have to be the first place some audience goes to," he said when his appointment was announced.

Search "bright bulb," and you might find his name. 

Comments

[Scott White]

I wrote a post on our blog on Ask about a year ago (http://www.brandidentityguru.com/wordpress/?p=7). Their branding blunders has killed them and in my opinion they will not recover. Ask Jeeves was great and that niche was great. Again, another company trying to be everything to everybody.

Now it's too late. They're cooked!