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Search Engine Brand Association Differs in UK and US

August 04, 2006

Bill's excellent post yesterday on brand association of MSN, Yahoo! and Google in the US prompted me to do the same analysis for the UK. I was surprised by some of the similarities and differences.

The striking similarity between the US and UK data is that Google is associated with search, Yahoo! is associated with its portal properties and MSN is associated with the tools it offers, namely tools for communicating online. The main difference is with MSN - whilst in the US, MSN is associated with portal content such as Games, Money, Chat and Music, in the UK the brand is currently wrapped up in Messenger and Hotmail.

Here's the same table that Bill posted, but with UK data (I've included some commentary below to highlight the similarities and differences between the two tables):

Search Engine Brand Association.png

  • Google's brand in the UK is much more strongly associated with Google Videos compared with the US. I will do a separate post on this because this is quite a recent phenomenon and seems to coincide with the launch of the UK specific site for Google Video. As a percent of all queries in the UK that include the keyword "google", 4.17% of the top 20 are searches relating to Google Video, compared to only .97% in the US.
  • US consumers are much more likely than UK consumers to search for the Google search engine, with searches for "google search" ranking #5 and "google search engine" ranking #8 among US searches that include the keyword "google" compared with #11 and #17 respectively in the UK.
  • For Yahoo! the biggest difference I noticed is the absence of "my yahoo" and "yahoo profiles" from the UK list. UK searches for "my yahoo" fall below the top 20 at #28 compared to #12 in the US and "yahoo profiles" ranks #46 in the UK compared to 17 in the US.
  • The query "yahoo personals" also figures more prominently in the US, at #6 in the US compared with #16 in the UK.
  • The partnership between BT and Yahoo! shows up twice in the UK list and quite prominently. For obvious reasons, the query does not appear in the US list.
  • MSN's UK brand is closely associated with the Messenger product, with 8 (and possibly 9 if you count "download msn") of the top 20 UK terms relating to either MSN Messenger or MSN Web Messenger, compared to 4 in the US.
  • Also, notice searches for "msn monkey" and "msn dollies". No, "monkey" is not a misspelling of "money" - both relate to consumers trying to find emoticons and avatars. While we aren't big on exclamation points in the UK, we certainly do like our smiley faces! The US equivalent seems to be "msn icons" and "msn display pictures"
  • With the list dominated in the UK with Messenger, what's missing? "msn chat", "msn music", "rockstar msn.com", "msn spaces", "msn money" and "msn home" - in other words, portal content.

I welcome other thoughts on the comparison. Feel free to add your opinion below.

Posted by Heather Hopkins at 10:10 AM | (1) | (1)

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Comments

Excellent post Heather. It's interesting how Google is so strongly associated with search. In my opinion this is a problem for Google. Ok they are the best in the industry at search and that's where ninety-something percent of their revenues come from. I find it disappointing that although they have created some great products such as Google Maps, Google Earth and Gmail they have been slow to market with these and failed to back them up with any significant awareness campaigns. They have some of the most intelligent and creative people in the industry working for them but I think they've disappointed when they've had the opportunity to become market leaders in other areas.

AM.

Posted by Andrew McCormick | August 4, 2006 06:30 AM

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