Ask.com tries to go for a more feminine approach
Posted by Kim Gordon on 29 May 2008 at 04:51 pm | Tagged as: Search Engine News
Choosing a consumer market to go after can be a difficult choice to make in business. This is especially challenging when the section of the market you are targeting has very specific needs. Ask.com has recently announced that they aim to target their search results around a more feminine market. As women can be particularly fussy, they’ll need a lot of oomph in their marketing strategy.
Ask CEO, Jim Safka, states that they are “going to refocus the brand to go after women in their late 30s and older, who already make up a disproportionate amount of Ask’s users (65 percent)”. It appears they have already reached a large portion of their chosen target market, so why is there a need to fill up the remaining percentage with additional women? Wouldn’t this ultimately deter men from using Ask? They are simultaneously rejecting the support from many other market sectors out there. Not a good move in my mind.
As one reader commented, “Short of turning their website pink and having women showcase their shoe collections; I don’t exactly see how you “target” a female audience away from using Google.” I’d like to know the answer to this statement too, because from what I can see, this will only be another area in which Ask risks exposing its shortcomings.
According to Crunchbase, Ask.com is currently sitting in fifth position in the search engine rat race. They may think that by focusing their resources on one particular market, they’ll be able to up their game and surpass one of the larger engines like Yahoo! or MSN. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good to think big, but believing you may be able to kidnap some of Google’s supporters for your own gain is surely being a bit too optimistic. Ask needs to have something superior up their sleeve if they aim to compete with Google. Loyal customers need a good reason to change their regular supplier, otherwise they are likely to stay put, or run back to them at the first sign of dissatisfaction.
Unfortunately for Ask, they don’t seem to be receiving much praise from their users, who state that its technology is not up to scratch when compared with the big boys in the business. Its indexes are not updated regularly, and its results are often not relevant to the searcher’s query or they appear to be outdated.
Does Ask.com believe that women won’t pick up on these aspects? It’s not usually a good idea to underestimate the power of the feminine mind, as we have proven our unwillingness to put up with substandard conditions, and that we’re not an easy target.
I think that it’s nice that marketers are finally turning their attention to women, but I agree that they need to give their approach careful consideration, as we’re not fools and are particularly weary of exploitation and manipulation.
Their aim I’m sure is not to give inferior results. Do you think a “feminine” engine would have bias and therefore less useful results?
Should we think of it less than an all-purpose search engine and more of a lifestyle portal? I think it will be a different service from Google.
Google is fine for most robust, relevant and untainted single-query results, while Ask may now be a portal for women to find more womanly things, without calling on a race against the other search engines.
It’s almost refreshing that they aren’t just after total dominance like our large bullying friends, Microsoft and Google.
Why not have all you need in a search engine? Ask.com is really pushing its luck, considering that they are more males dominating the search world the team at Ask.com need to look at the idea closely. Do women really have special needs?
Good idea from Ask.com but how real will it be? Kim mentions that it might deter men from visiting the site. I say it will! I am not sure how they might intend to keep the guys coming back. The last thing I want to see is women discussing where to buy shoes, or what kind of diet they are on, and I am not saying this is all women talk about. Women make up a fairly large percentage of internet users, but I just can’t see what they might offer to get the women to convert. Only time will tell.
I’d say even woman will be deterred from the search engine if all they do is talk about where to buy shoes and what the latest diet fad is.