Search is the new shopping aisle for Google India
Thoughts on the increasing behaviour of Indians to use Google before shopping, the rise of voice search and what brands can learn.
I call my mother ‘Malkin’. And we hardly like each other.
She is 65 and rarely pauses. She has always been a strong, smart, hard-working, stubborn, and kick-ass woman. She is the youngest and the most beautiful among her 9 siblings.
Malkin was removed from school because of her outgoing nature. Got married at the age of 16. Gave birth to two sons. One is right now talking to you. The other one is making money for the bank.
My mother wished that both her sons should have the best education, good jobs, and a comfortable life. To fulfill this wish she started a small business of selling garments with my father. In today’s world, we would call her a Women Entrepreneur.
So for more than two decades, my mother became a door-to-door saleswoman and my father had a day job in South Eastern Railways while handling all the accounts and operations. The objective was to give her children a better life. She succeeded with one. But she always felt the pain of not going to school and being educated like her siblings.
Now she is no more a businesswoman. However, she is the most active in our family and has a busy life. Before the pandemic, she was aggressively planning for a solo trip to Kailash Mansarovar.
If she is not in the kitchen or spending time with more than her 50 pots, she will be engrossed in her smartphone spending time watching videos on YouTube. She hardly watches TV. From gardening videos to Ranveer’s new recipe to watching all the latest happenings from Bollywood to US Elections, she watches all of them.
Recently she came to me and asked if I can do some price search for dishwashers. As usual, I forgot. But the next day she knew all the brands that are selling dishwashers in India and their price range.
How did she do the search? She used YouTube and the Voice Search in Hindi.
After a week she visited shops with my brother and zeroed on the brand she wants to buy. Now the only thing remaining is placing an online order and getting it home delivered.
Did we say the Internet is only for the millennials?
Wired editor-in-chief - Nicholas Thompson recently described Facebook as a platform that knows you’re pregnant before you do.
I guess Google knows the query even before you type or speak.
Earlier last month just before the festival season opened up online the search giant(owns 92% of the search market globally) released a set of three ads. The intent was to showcase Google App as a discovery platform for e-commerce websites.
One of the ads features two grannies busy scroll shopping for a pair of headphones. Both are busy hopping between sites scanning for discounts and trying to find the right product at the right price. A third granny joins the conversation and suggests the Google app for easy search. She informs that the Google app is the single point discovery platform for all e-commerce searches.
The film closes with the tagline, “Shopping Se Pehle Google Search Pe Shopping.”
Are they tracking my mother’s search behavior?
Wired reported that Google fiddles with your search with small design tweaks that you wouldn’t notice.
In June 2018, a blistering report from the Norwegian Consumer Council found that Google and Facebook both used specific interface choices to strip away user privacy at almost every turn.
A detailed investigation by the Markup found that in 15,000 queries examined, nearly half of the first page of mobile search results were designed to keep the user on Google, rather than directing them to another website.
Google ignores them and at times makes the tweaks that are required to keep the press silent.
Google’s latest positioning in India comes as no surprise. Before buying anything online or offline, doing a Google search has become a default behaviour. Additionally, the pandemic has supercharged this behaviour.
Earlier in the first quarter of 2020, when India went into lockdown. Two things happened - one the consumer was spending time on the Internet and two the industry witnessed a plethora of reports analysing the consumer and defining strategies in a post-pandemic world. We are in the last quarter and we are nowhere close to post-pandemic life. Pundits are telling that it might be the second quarter of 2021.
Google came up with an extensive report “What is India searching for.” Obviously, I will trust the search giant when it comes to tracking user search behaviours.
Google informed, “A single, powerful reality sits at the heart of consumer behavior: the exploration cycle. It is greatly defined by “always-on search,” an established user habit aided by an endless stream of information.”
The report also highlighted the desire for personalized offerings among Indians continues to stay strong. Users want multi-moment brands that understand their likes, dislikes, and interests based on their online footprints. They want them to be available at almost every step of their digital journey.
Google Shopping for discovering & understanding
That was April 2020 when the virus has just said hello to India. After shouting Go Caron Go Carona and trying to find everything about the vaccine, we have somehow realised that there is no going back. The consumer has also changed and so has the buying behaviour.
“The new customer journey is more personal & fragmented than ever,” says Google in its latest Connected Beauty Consumer Report. “The current omnichannel world encompasses physical and digital shopping experiences and a multitude of touchpoints that shoppers navigate at various stages, thus causing shoppers to move back and forth between the stages.”
Consumers do not necessarily go through all stages of the journey to make their buying decisions. They are also divided on what constitutes their critical moments in the journey. As shopping becomes more focused, activities relating to knowing more about specific products or brands, addressing individual needs become more critical.
The report states that the purchase decision is made largely in the upper funnel touchpoints i.e. Discover & understand the phase.
Dusshera ends so that Diwali can be celebrated. This means influencing the Indian consumer to move out of the comfort zone and spend online continues.
Whether the Indian middle class is ready to shop is a different story. The Indian consumer remains pessimistic, according to the Reserve Bank of India. The consumer confidence index was at a record low of 49.9% in September compared to 53.8% in July.
In the meantime, Google is running ads for its 'Ads' offering on YouTube. The 15-second pre-roll ads show Google Ads acting as the link between the consumers and a small business that sells what they're searching for.
“If a customer searches for a particular query on Google Search (engine), then Google Ads displays results across different aggregators as ads, hence helping the customers find what they are searching for and small businesses find more customers.”
Here is one such ad for an interested kharidar who is pregnant and is craving for pickle. The ad also shows that the seller is a regular housewife supporting the small business community.
With this campaign, Google says it is helping consumers and small businesses at the nearest point.
Pramila Jayapal, a Democratic congresswoman from Washington state has a problem as reported by Wired - Should Google’s Ad Market Be Regulated Like the Stock Market?
While questioning Google CEO Sundar Pichai she said:
“The problem is that Google controls all of these entities. So it’s running the marketplace, it’s acting on the buy side, and it’s acting on the sell-side at the same time, which is a major conflict of interest. It allows you to set rates very low as a buyer of ad space for newspapers, depriving them of their ad revenue, and then also to sell high to small businesses who are very dependent on advertising on your platform. It sounds a bit like the stock market. Except, unlike the stock market, there’s no regulation on your ad exchange market.”
Nonetheless, Search is the new shopping aisle for Google India driving discovery for products purchased online & offline.
Consumers use search in different ways – to obtain knowledge, to connect with brands and retailers, and eventually buy both online and in-store.
Google mentions in the report that new technologies help to meet buyers’ needs and add value to the online touchpoints. Voice Assistant has the highest potential among the latest prevalent technologies.
Voice search leads new technologies
By 2021, it’s estimated that 72% of internet users in India will prefer to use a language other than English, and voice will help bridge the language gap by allowing users to interact in a way that is familiar to them.
According to Google, on average, Google Assistant queries are 200 times more conversational and 40 times more action-oriented (“Ok Google: Turn on the lights in the living room”) compared to using Search.
Within a year of launch, 24% of all Gaana users were using voice to play their favorite songs. The brand added voice search functionality to its app as a way to overcome literacy barriers among new internet users.
To highlight this growing insight, Google recently launched a campaign for Google Nest. In one of the cutest ads of 2020, the device helps Nancy D’Costa transform into Rani Lakshmi Bai for an online school pay. Nancy has endless questions and Google Nest does the job well.
What is there for non-profit and for-profit organizations?
The report may be primarily focussed on the beauty category but it has simple insights for brands of all categories.
One of them is to be easily accessible or in Google’s language:
Make it easy or be off the shortlist. Loyalty is at a premium. Brands with easy to find information are more likely to make it to the consumer shortlist.
Given the overload of information on the internet, consumers turn to online video, social media & search to help them narrow their brand choices. While this isn’t a surprise, Google recommends brands to leverage online video by being present on the video platform of choice & reinforce with a great quality website.
Finally, consumers turn to online resources for information searches & reviews.
“Brands that make it easy for consumers to find this content by building multiple content platforms are likely to be preferred.”
Before you invest in the next-gen tech, please make sure to educate, inform, and reduce the pain points such as difficulty choosing the right product (21%) and difficulty to decide on a product without brand experience (24%).
Meanwhile, my mother is planning to start a YouTube channel dedicated to her love for gardening. Her granddaughter is helping her.
She thinks I don’t have the right teaching skills.
I rest my case.