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The need for "Research Quality" search engines
Opportunities for improvement -- Serving advertisers
This page attempts to get at the needs of advertisers and of any organization that is trying to spread its message. It also examines the usefulness of search tools in the context of building awareness, interest, decision, and action in favor of your message. If this describes your work, you are invited to offer your opinions and comments at the bottom of this page.
Problems with the push model for messages
Clutter. Ad fatigue. Poor recall of ads viewed the previous day. A hundred-plus-to-one ratio of messages received to the number of messages we act upon. Discomfort at our personal information being sold and traded among marketers. Outright annoyance at ads that use irritation tactics to rise from the clutter. A sense of being used, a sense of being viewed as walking wallets rather than as persons.
The problem can be capsulated: The need of the sender to get the message out is far greater than our need to receive it.
Might there be a better way?
One of the best received marketing media is the telephone yellow pages. Why is it liked? Because it puts the customer in control. A yellow pages phone book is non-intrusive. It is simply there when needed. It serves by providing information that facilitates the consumer's wishes.
Trust is another positive factor. Credibility is enhanced, a message is more believable, when it comes from a trusted source. Advertisers have tried to capitalize on this by using the right spokesperson for a product ... a gentle, child-friendly person to hawk Jello pudding, a basketball star to promote shoes.
Armed with statistics that show word of mouth advertising is several times as effective as broadcast or published messages, marketers have tried schemes to create buzz. These tactics worked -- sort of -- at first. But when a technique is revealed to be artificial, trust is dashed.
Consumer Reports, the vehicle of Consumers Union, is viewed positively by literally millions of families on account of seven decades of unbiased research and reporting of information that proves helpful to consumers in decision making.
Opportunity -- an effective "pull" channel
Trying to educate society or even a small niche on any topic is very expensive. People are difficult to reach. Getting them to engage themselves in your interests is even harder. Would it not be more effective and less expensive to let the prospects do their own self-education? Give them the learning tools, let them do a lot of the work. So let's build an alternative channel that gets around the negatives and capitalizes on positive factors shown above.
First, it should be a pull channel. That is, the potential customer is in control, calling up the information she wants when she wants it. This control assures that the channel is not intrusive; irritation and message overload are avoided.
Second, this channel is characterized by collaborative gathering and refining of information.
Third, this channel has low marginal cost to the advertiser.
Information pull -- method
Here is how it works:
- The advertiser / message sender assembles content in the form of a browsable searchable electronic index. At first, it may be as simple as creation of an index for an existing web site.
- The advertiser / message sender posts a refreshed updated copy as frequently as necessary on a web site, ready for download. Systems might be established to forward updated copies automatically to persons who request them.
- Persons receiving these indexes may use them directly or add them to a collection of indexes.
- Such collections might be made searchable at the collector's web site, using the second or third level of Internet search (part of the "dream" toolkit). The advantage to the collector is creation of traffic at the web site; the better the collection, the more likely people will come.
- People use the site to compare offerings among competing products or services represented within the collection.
- Users may in turn do targeted search related to their niche interests, receive results in the form of new indexes, and create progressively more targeted content for their own use or for further sharing.
Information pull -- benefits
Benefits of such pull channels for information:
- The potential seller arranges information about offered products and services in a light that is favorable.
- Media costs are minimal.
- Dissemination of information takes advantage of people's interests in product categories and types of information.
- Would-be gurus or "marketing mavens" compete to have the fullest, best array of information on a product / service category.
- The potential buyer has control in the sense of exercising initiative when there is a possibility of making a purchase. The information, while not unbiased, can be compared readily with alternatives through searching on specific features of the product or service.
Your feedback
Your comments on this page would be welcomed.
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