Chinese Search Engine Engagement

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Rick Tobin Gord Hotchkiss Pavan Lee January 2008 Principal Authors Rick Tobin Director of Research
Enquiro Gord Hotchkiss CEO and President
Enquiro Pavan Lee Research Manager
MDAS
Contributing Writers & Analysts Krista Brown Research Analyst Intern
Enquiro Jess Gao Research Analyst Enquiro Research Search marketing is an incredibly effective channel for connecting with Enquiro potential customers. And the more you know about how your customers Barb Newman interact with search, the more successful that channel will be. At Enquiro, Project Manager we never stop exploring how to make search more successful. Enquiro Dr Biggi Weideschel www.enquiroresearch.com Research Analyst
Enquiro 1.800.277.9997
2 1628 Dickson Ave., Suite 300, Kelowna, BC, Canada V1Y 9X1 Enquiro Research © Copyright 2007 Enquiro Search Solutions, Inc. It is forbidden to copy this report without prior written consent. For permissions please contact andrew.spoeth@enquiro.com. This whitepaper had its beginnings almost 2 years the Chinese search. at least enough to create a ago now - that was when we started looking for any fairly compelling talking point for SES. What I promise everybody that chooses to read this type of research into the possible cultural implica- is that Enquiro will deliver on all these aspirations tions on Search. Needless to say, there wasn't a lot What we got was so much more. in the very near fu-of information out there. ture. When we took our results to China we got a lot of So we started thinking about how we could possibly nods from the audience - we weren't out to lunch. build some sort of internal intelligence on the sub- In fact, a lot of people started coming up and tell- ject, and honestly, it looked fairly cost prohibitive. ing us that they agreed with a lot of the findings, We weren't about to take our equipment around the and were happy to see that we actually went a step world in 80 days, hire translators at every port of further to explain why the things were happening call, and spend sleepless hours in bad hotel rooms that both them and us were seeing in our respec- trying to aggregate heatmaps and create some in- tive research. sight. As a result, we rushed back to native soil and Rick Tobin Strangely enough, nobody in the office seemed too started writing. First we wrote articles and Director of Research keen on volunteering for such a task. go figure. blogged, but then we actually sat down and started Enquiro Research looking for some partnerships to produce a good But even though the task seemed complicated to quality whitepaper. say the least, it was nonetheless important. This is the fruit of our efforts, but it isn't done. Search has allowed almost every company, regard- less of physical location, to compete on a global We still want to do more; look to new engines and scale. (A small sponsored campaign can work to new mediums (mobile for one); as well, we'd like build brand awareness in Senegal and Budapest.) to deconstruct the purchasing decision and the cultural implications on buying behavior. But in For this reason, you can easily see why it would order to do this we understand that we need to make sense to have some knowledge as to how take incremental steps; however, I promise you language and culture could possibly impact how we that we will, as a company, get there and fulfill Search, let alone, how we buy. these ambitions. Costing and logistics made us put the idea onto a I'd also like to see us take this paper a step further shelf for a little while, but then the opportunity to to consider Yahoo China and some other emerging speak in China came up and we thought there was engines. no better time then to resurrect the cultural study, but maybe pare it down in scope. I'd also like to see us add to this paper by getting a larger sample and doing some demographic and We decided that maybe if we could get a sample of geographic sampling in China. ESL students - Chinese students that had just ar- rived at the local university to start their studies of What's more, I'd also like to see us look at other the English language that we might be able ... [download for more]