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:
