Mindshare Matters
Interesting post on Silicon Alley Insider today, titled “Users Love Microsoft, Yahoo Search — When It’s Branded With A Google Logo”. The post goes on to discuss how Google does internal tests where it put its logo and treatment on another engine’s search results. In the tests, “users still prefer the results with the Google logo, even if they’re not Google results.”
Talk about having a hold on the market financially and mentally. You have to wonder if it will matter how much Microsoft spends on marketing with their new search engine, Bing.
Building a brand, nurturing it, and protecting that brand matters. The more mindshare you can gain of the masses, more specifically your prospects, the easier it is to get a foot in the door.
And it works both ways. Remember Microsoft’s “Mojave Experiment” where they showed people their “new” operating system Mojave and then told them at the end it was really Vista? I was never sure if that campaign was good or bad. I knew that the point was to give Vista a fair shake based on all the bad word-of-mouth it was getting and show that once you took away the Vista name, it was OK. But I always thought, “Wow, you’ve built a brand with such a bad rap that even if it cured world hunger, people will have a negative perspective on it.” It would have been better off to immediately come out with a new OS where with the performance issues resolved then stay with Vista and improve it because no matter how well their engineers did, it was still going to be Vista.
Mindshare matters. It can help make a good product “awesome” or an OK product “terrible”. Working hard to make sure it stays on the positive side can help make customers’ perceptions even better then it is due to the actual value you add.
