Media, Rivals Aim to Stir It up for Search Giant, but to Consumers It’s Still a Beloved Brand by Michael Learmonth and Abbey Klaassen

Published: April 20, 2009

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) – A little internal test at the Mountain View, Calif., search giant goes like this: You take Google search results, slap them on a Yahoo search page and ask users which results they like better. Inevitably, Google wins – even though they’re the same results. Such is the power of the Google brand, arguably the company’s most important asset. But after a decade of near-universal love, Google is facing its toughest test. It’s still got a great product and a good story but it’s big enough that competitors are slinging arrows from all directions. And while it’s cultivated a fun, easy and helpful brand persona, its culture is highly data-driven and insular. It’s a combination that helped it win Round 1 of the search war, but may make managing Brand Google a whole lot tougher going forward. Not a day has gone by in the past few months where Google hasn’t been blamed for some societal ill, economic or otherwise. To read the headlines in the U.S., Google took away your morning paper and is chipping away at your privacy. In the U.K., citizens of the village of Broughton linked arms to stop Google’s cameras from mapping the town as part of Street View. And this comes after a year of battling blogger insinuations about it motives after CEO Eric Schmidt conceded that its cuddly motto, “Don’t be evil” won’t necessarily apply to all situations in the future, not to mention a public-relations ballast spearheaded by Microsoft but delivered by its second-most- important constituency: advertisers. Indeed, in the downturn, even Google’s economics have come back to earth. Search-ad spending, like every other kind of advertising, is taking a hit, and the first quarter of 2009 was the first time Google’s revenue actually fell from the prior quarter. The company has shuttered businesses such as radio and print advertising and even had the first layoffs in its history. “That is going to be part of life for them,” said Tim Cadogan, a former Yahoo exec who now runs OpenX, an ad-serving competitor to Google’s DoubleClick. “There are two levels of brand, its consumer brand and its industry brand. Its consumer brand is pretty darn strong. The industry brand has become more difficult for them to manage because they have become so powerful and explicitly ambitious.” READ THE FULL ARTICLE