The other day I was talking about the Unique Selling Proposition and how valuable it is when a marketer can distinguish itself by claiming a benefit or feature that cannot easily be claimed by another marketer. I mentioned that often you can do that simply by staking a claim to a generic benefit nobody else is talking about… make it your own, and anybody who later says “we have that too” would look foolish.
Google, though we take them for granted today, has a pretty unusual marketing history: they climbed to the top in a competitive field (remember when we all searched with Altavista?) by just being better than everybody else. So it was so very appropriate that Google’s interface also looked different. So stark and simple, just that search box in the middle of a blank page. The drama of unused white space… never a better example.
So now we have the new Google interface that has left this behind. You get a busy page with results in the middle, Adwords on the right, and a menu of related results on the left. But more important, you get a page that looks like everybody else’s search results page.
Not many marketers can claim the high ground that Google legitimately appropriated with its old page. To voluntarily cede your USP…. for that is what they are doing with this new generic interface… is a bone headed decision.
It occurred to me as I was thinking about this that grandfather was a proud member of the Dallas Bonehead Club. I am not sure of all they did but I know a core value was to be silly and irrelevant. Good for them in that straight laced Southern business community, maybe not so good in today’s competitive business envronment. Bad move, Google.