Back to the Future... with Mascots
Terence posted in SEO on 24 April 2009
Those eagle eyed watchers of the media in the UK may have spotted a familiar butler popping up on advertising again in the last few weeks, proudly proclaiming 'he's back'. The search engine Ask Jeeves rather unceremoniously dropped their mascot 'Jeeves' as part of a large relaunch of the site as just 'Ask.com' a few years back, claiming people were associating him with an old and outdated website which only answered questions. Now, in an apparent complete reversal of that decision, they have slipped him back into the site complete with a new look, accompanying marketing campaign, and some obligatory social networking connections.
Ask, like MSN, Yahoo, and most of the large search engines, has been struggling with a declining share of the search engine market for some years as Google continues to strengthen its hold on the market. Their last big relaunch strategy focused on overhauling the searching experience itself, making everything look slick, and improving the relevancy of results, as many of the search engine operators have tried in recent times. Their recent move suggests this strategy hasn't yielded the results they'd hoped though (realistically will most people notice the difference in their search results from one engine to the next?), with a move back towards mascot-led marketing instead.
Mascots are an interesting and strong branding tool, but also one of the most difficult to pull off. Many mascots will just not take off, and be quietly dropped at the next available rebrand. On the other hand, if you can find a character which hooks into the public's imagination, whether that be for their quirkyness, a famous catchphrase, or anything else that just makes them instantly recognisable, it's more likely to remain in their memory too when they next make a decision.
I have to be honest, I won't hold my breath about Google losing it's dominant share anytime soon, but it will be interesting to watch if this focus on branding via their mascot can help Ask pull back any share from the other engines such as MSN or Yahoo.