What’s in a word? Everything!

Yesterday I had a debate with someone from Google about search which was somewhat impractical, but perhaps many debates are. The debate was about: Is search a communication channel?

His argument was yes because search delivers an audience. True, and I agree it’s a very valuable and targeted audience. Marketing is at its best if it gets consumers into the inquiry stage and search is the logical medium to allow consumers to inquire.

My argument was no because it’s not about search but about find. If search marketing was called find marketing, everyone’s mindset would be different. Search is a pipe, just like a cable is the pipe for television. Through the pipe you’re bringing consumers to a place where they might find what they’re looking for and that is the channel. Search is more like a free shuttle bus bringing consumers to a mall.

 Then we had another beer and concluded the discussion was very academic. But this morning I was thinking about why nobody is positioning themselves as the find agency. Even the search engine “ask.com” decided not to be about “answer” but about “ask”. Ah well, another industry is even worse. They (and we) don’t find, we don’t even search, we re-search. Although it works as a business model: “We have found an answer! Never mind, we believe you should look again.”

 Peter