by Jean M. La Rue

Created on: January 14, 2008

Google is the undisputed leader of search engine providers and competitors can't seem to catch up. Volumes have been written about the innovation and leadership that resulted in Google's meteoric rise to the top of the heap. Less reported is how this company, year on year, effectively defends against new competitor products. Google has built a virtual "brand monopoly" that keeps this company in the number one spot, with their closest competitor, Yahoo, running a distant second.

So powerful is this brand identity, in fact, that the Google name has become a verb in contemporary speech, as in, "Just google it." Thus, the name has become synonymous with Internet search and the first choice for over 65% of search engine users. In April of last year, market researcher Millward Brown Optimor named Google the most powerful global brand of 2007, with $66.4 billion in brand value, exceeding monolithic giants General Electric at $61.9 billion and Microsoft at $55 billion. When a company is able to achieve this level of branding and marketplace dominance, it borders on monopoly and becomes very grim news, indeed, for the competition. Companies like Yahoo, MSN, and Ask are essentially left to compete amongst themselves over the remains of the Internet search pie that Google leaves on the plate - a mere 35% of the market.

A number of other companies illustrate the previous point very well, including: Kleenex, Band-Aid, Jell-O, and Q-Tips. All have store brand and generic product producers who manage to capture a minor share of the facial tissue, bandages, gelatin, and cotton swab markets. They do so by undercutting the price of the brand name for the cost-conscious consumer. Since Google's search engine is free to use, even that avenue of competition is denied to Yahoo, MSN, and Ask. Perhaps, the greater obstacle to real competition for all of these "other brand" companies is to convince the consumer to stop asking for a Kleenex or a Band-Aid instead of a tissue or a bandage - or to stop telling their friends and colleagues to "just google it."

Marketing experts tell us that consumers tend to make purchasing decisions based on peer recommendations and direct experience. Thus, each time we tell someone to "google it" we are recommending (whether we realize it or not) that specific search engine and driving more and more users through Google's virtual front door. This has other more far reaching consequences for their competition as Google provides a growing list of products and services that directly compete with the core products of Yahoo and MSN.

We are entering the era of the Internet superstore offering search engine, online shopping, e-mail, blogging, social networking, and more, all under one roof. Google has done a good job of capitalizing on the massive amount of traffic to their search engine to "sell" these other products. The goal of Google, Yahoo and MSM is to get the user in their front door with the search engine & keep them there as long as possible with other products in order to expose them to vast amounts of advertising. This is what generates the billions of dollars in revenue each year for these companies. It's easy to see how Google's outstanding brand identity not only discourages competition in the search engine arena, it also threatens to take market share and revenue away from the competition in other products.

Google is fast becoming the Wal-Mart of the Internet and the competition may never be able to catch up to that.

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