Google: Consumer Behavior

Describe the perception of the brand regarding competitors (positioning map)

The main satisfaction reasons about the search engine market are coming from the quality of their services(mainly search services but also the convenience of associated services such as mail services, blogs, news…). The main unsatisfaction criteria could come from privacy, lock-in strategy, commercial aspects such as advertisement so in one word the commercial aspect.

Explanations of the positioning map:

Google was formerly a company providing a competitive technology to Yahoo with an advantage in the pertinence of results. Google at that time was not as popular as it used to be now and then the privacy issues was not a day to day conversation topic. Right now Google is accumulating an incredible amount of data due to the number of services they are 
offering for free which are moreover high demanded services. So I would say that from time to time Google moved from a mid quality of service Internet tools provider to a high quality one. However in order to reach such level of quality you need an incredible amount of data, just the fact of gathering those data can be seen as a change in Google commercial approach. Moreover when the user is seeing that advertisement which are displayed to him are really focus on his personality he can then be aware that a use of those data have been made. So this is why I would say that during the couple of years Google success made him moved in the positioning map.

Yahoo on the other hand did not really much move its commercial perception because it is as successful as before… or even less. But it is sure of two things, first Yahoo as Google increase its portfolio of services(emergence of Mail services, Video Search etc…) increasing the quality of service to offer. Second thing before the gap between Yahoo and Google was not as big as nowadays. 

Microsoft is as we know the extreme in terms of making business: lock in effect, bundling. The quality of its service regarding search engine is under the ones of Yahoo and Google however it is still offering an interesting portfolio of services linked to this product. 

Baidu the Chinese search engine has the reputation of getting a lot of its revenues by companies ready to pay a lot of money to change the results of display. So one could say that it is a very commercial approach in comparison to Google and Yahoo. In terms of quality Baidu is still not providing key services such as emails and foreign languages interfaces. 

Kosmix is a young Indian search engine really revolutionary in his way of displaying request results however nowadays in the field of search engine you need far more than providing a search experience to your users. 

The same observation can be made to Xquick which has the reputation of being an anonymous search engine, which means no customized ads and even no ads at all.