Monday, March 19, 2018

THE MANIPULATION OF THE SEARCH


Blog Post 8



Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Alphabet in recent years have consolidated as tech and consumer discretionary giants. Each on their own niche, and each with their own strength, have also started to overlap in order to gain momentum and capture more consumers from their competitors.

Amazon is probably the world’s largest retail store and the company has also managed to threaten other more traditional players such as Walmart and Target. However, Google is taking matters into its own hands and created a new program called Shopping Actions which allows customers to be redirected to traditional retailers, instead of directly to Amazon. Additionally, Walmart and Google announced they made an alliance where the search engine redirects customers to the retailer and avoids Amazon taking a piece of the pie. Reuters also announced that every time a customer asks “Where can I buy…,” not only the website will display Walmart first, but also via the Home Assistant in a similar matter to Alexa and Amazon.

Personally, I think that these alliances are necessary, but at the same time they manipulate consumer preferences. Depending on the item a customer is looking for, it might be easier to explore Amazon over Walmart, but since the customer will probable initiate the query in Google, the competitor has a few extra steps to make in order to complete that sale. From a digital marketing perspective, I believe that companies should begin exploring traditional channels once again because not only will these regain momentum via search engines, but who knows, Google might try exploring brick and mortar, just like Amazon recently announced with Books, and its latest acquisition; Whole Foods.

No comments: