Then, Jim Rud­nick “piled on” with this addition:

“As Michael stated, Google has more “mar­keters” IMHO, than engi­neers!” (which he later qual­i­fied with a “well, not really”)

This wasn’t even my col­umn they were respond­ing to, but I just couldn’t let those two obvi­ously ill informed com­ments go unanswered.

Mr. Mar­tinez and Mr. Rud­nick, its real­ity check time. Any­one who has ever spent any time at Google, knows any­one at Google, has read any­thing on the his­tory of Google, or has spent any time try­ing to under­stand the cul­ture at Google, knows that engi­neers rule supreme there and mar­ket­ing is con­sid­ered at least two rungs below a nec­es­sary evil, which is some­what ironic for a com­pany who’s rev­enues rely solely on…that’s right…marketing!

You can pos­si­bly hate Google for a num­ber of things, but sub­ju­gat­ing the qual­ity of their results for a quick mar­ket­ing win has never been, or never will be, one of them. I’ve been fol­low­ing this com­pany pretty much since day one and they are obses­sive about the qual­ity of their user’s expe­ri­ence. I may debate their approach to design or the aes­thetic appeal of their inter­faces. I may ques­tion their need to dom­i­nate every­thing. I may take excep­tion to the intel­lec­tual arro­gance that seems to occa­sion­ally seep out of Moun­tain View – but I have never ever ques­tioned their pri­or­i­ties. Their dom­i­na­tion in search comes squarely on the shoul­ders of their high regard for their user, and not one of their seri­ous com­peti­tors would ever dis­pute that.

This Google “mar­ket­ing” that Michael speaks of is a mea­ger trickle com­pared to the mil­lions that Microsoft pumped into the launch of Bing, or, lest we for­get, the failed adver­tis­ing cam­paigns of Ask.com, Yahoo or even Infos­eek, when they were bought by Dis­ney and became Go.com. Tell me, when is the last time you launched a search on Go.com?

Mar­ket­ing alone will never estab­lish a dom­i­nant search player. They are estab­lished solely on the strength of their user’s expe­ri­ences. You might want to do a com­par­i­son of mar­ket shares and mar­ket­ing expen­di­tures to get that point dri­ven home more force­fully, Michael.

In fact, I would shud­der to think that any dom­i­nate player in any indus­try got to where they are based on mar­ket­ing alone, and not by ade­quately meet­ing or exceed­ing their customer’s expec­ta­tions. I live by another adage, “Noth­ing ever killed a bad prod­uct faster than good adver­tis­ing.” I talked about Jim Lecinski’s con­cept of the ZMOT a few columns back. Mar­ket­ing pro­vides just one input into the chain reac­tion that Lecin­ski chron­i­cles. Let’s walk through this again; because this is more than just a rebut­tal, it’s an illus­tra­tion for any­one who shares the same delu­sional view that mar­ket­ing is all it takes to win a market.

Mar­ket­ing pro­vides a stim­u­lus that can spark a buyer’s inter­est. After this stim­u­lus, the buyer then researches to make sure the hyper­bole of the mar­ket­ing mes­sage bears at leas some pass­ing resem­blance to real­ity. This is Lecinski’s ZMOT (Zero Moment of Truth). Then, there’s the FMOT (First Moment of Truth).  This is when a buyer actu­ally picks up a prod­uct off the prover­bial “shelf”. Finally, there’s the SMOT (Sec­ond Moment of Truth), which is the buyer’s actual expe­ri­ence with the product.

If mar­ket­ing and the buyer’s real­ity are aligned, these ele­ments cre­ate a vir­tu­ous cycle, where the promise of the ad matches the expe­ri­ence deliv­ered. The result is ongo­ing brand loyalty.

But, if all the com­pany cares about is the mar­ket­ing, then it all starts to fall apart in the ZMOT and the SMOT. The cycle is destroyed and you have a pissed off cus­tomer telling any­one who will lis­ten that they’ve been duped. That’s why Jim Lecin­ski (speak­ing on behalf of Google) rightly stresses the impor­tance of the ZMOT for mar­keters. It’s where the rub­ber starts to hit the road.

I don’t care if Messrs. Rud­nick and Mar­tinez have a sore spot for Google. I do care when they imply those 13 years plus of pro­duc­ing high qual­ity search results and deeply car­ing about the user are irrel­e­vant and that Google bought their way to the top of the search engine heap through mar­ket­ing. That’s dan­ger­ous think­ing, for any indus­try. We have enough crap to fix in cor­po­rate Amer­ica with­out let­ting off-hand com­ments like these go unan­swered. It’s this kind of think­ing that got us into the mess we cur­rently find ourselves.

Let’s appre­ci­ate qual­ity when we see it, and not assume the whole world is a sucker for a quick pitch!

Orig­i­nally pub­lished in Mediapost’s Search Insider August 18, 2011


Biography / Resume : Gord Hotchkiss is the founder and senior vice president of Enquiro, now part of Mediative. He is renowned in the industry for his expertise when it comes to understanding online user and search behaviour. He and the Enquiro team have built a solid reputation for being the leading experts when it comes to understanding what happens on a search portal and why. Before Enquiro, Gord was chairman and director of SEMPO (The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization), he worked as a columnist for MediaPost and Search Engine Land, and he was a regular speaker at industry conferences and events. Gord is also the author of The BuyerSphere Project: How Business Buys from Business in a digital marketplace.