For Us, Buy Us
David Greising of the Chicago Tribune has an excellent article on the sometimes bitter battle for supremacy between Google and local favorite Baidu in the Chinese internet market. With a reported 62% of market share, Baidu is currently beating the pants off of the men from Mountain View. And though Baidu's better performance can be attributed to many factors, two which are mentioned in the article are especially noteworthy primarily because Google seems unable or unwilling to imitate them. The first, the one Google can not imitate, is Baidu's strategy of using nationalism as a basis of differentiation:
Baidu has built a dominant position. It has astutely designed features that appeal to Chinese users, beat its competitors to market and cast its most lethal opponent, Google, as a foreigner with suspicious ambitions. Baidu's none-too-subtle use of nationalism was on display in a recent online advertising campaign. It didn't slam Google by name, but it featured a group of villagers accosting a foreign couple. "You don't understand us, you don't understand us," one village elder scolded the outsiders. In a country with an ingrained distrust of outsiders, the message resonated. Li, who was educated in the U.S. and helped design the pioneering search engine InfoSeek, has no qualms about playing the nationalism card. "We think search is not just about technology," Li said. "It's also about language. It's also about culture."
The second pertains to another element of Baidu's business model- its pricing structure, particularly its practice of allowing advertisers to buy their way to the top of search engine rankings:
Baidu has decoded China's cultural cryptography in ways that have eluded Google. A key example: Baidu's embrace of paid search results. For many popular search terms, Baidu will rank results by how much an advertiser is willing to pay for prominent placement. Google and the other U.S.-based players don't embrace pay-for-placement. For U.S. users, it would undermine a search engine's credibility. In China, though, surveys have shown that users trust paid results. Many believe that an advertiser's willingness to pay for placement reflects a confidence that they've got just the right answer to the user's query. If a Chinese user queries "mah-jongg" and an advertiser is selling hand-carved sets, well, that's a match. "If an advertiser wants to pay a lot of money, that probably says something," Li says. "The best measure for this is our growth pattern. If users keep coming back to our service, we're doing the right thing."
Commentary
There is a line of sportswear popular in the US called F.U.B.U. According to Wikipedia ,
...the name is widely considered an acronym of "For Us By Us" (referring to black people), although in its initial year of conception was regarded as meaning "five urban brothers united" as evidenced by their clothing tags. FUBU staff started the company for their local black youth community and the company employed a high percentage of blacks. The founders intended to compete with predominantly white-owned sportswear companies such as Nike, which use inner-city black youth in New York and elsewhere to research what is cool, then make products from the feedback. FUBU felt that Nike was profiting from the authenticity of New York street fashion without giving enough back to the community, and that to this extent black culture was being exploited. In targeting African Americans and defining their competitors this way, FUBU stirred controversy as to whether the company intended to shut out non-blacks (although many people of other backgrounds have evidently had no problem wearing their clothing). FUBU insists they are not intentionally exclusive, and their marketingtargets all races.
Given its propensity for ethnocentric and nationalistic appeals, as well as its embrace of paid search results, Baidu ought to position itself as the FUBU of China with the acronym there meaning "For Us, Buy Us."