Maybe they should have Asked Jeeves first

Remember when you could go to askjeeves.com and the little butler guy would pop up at your service to answer any burning question you could come up with?

Well in ‘06, the company got bought out, they re-branded to ask.com, got rid of “Jeeves the butler” and became a Google look-a-like site. Oh, wait! I mean Mr. Jeeves “retired blissfully”<—

Now of course they conducted tons of market research, interviews, etc, etc to come to that decision but now…Jeeves is back! He’s fresh out of retirement like Jordan wearing #45 and he’s got a new look.

Why is he back? Is it because…

…Too many loyal customers complained about his absence?

…They are fighting like cats and dogs with MSN, Yahoo, everyone else and their mother for the 10% market share that Google does not own?

…Or maybe they realized that the little butler guy that may have annoyed some people was actually a creative, fun and personal touch that connected with searchers and differentiated it from the other engines?

I think the domain www.ask.com lends a lot of credibility to their operation but they should have stuck to their guns, stayed “different” and kept the iconic butler as part of their brand. Who knows how much brand loyalty they would have built by now.  Thru their research they asked a lot of people what they thought, but maybe they should have Asked Jeeves first.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 20th, 2009 at 11:17 am and is filed under Branding, Search engine marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.