Are Brand Attitudes Contagious? Consumer Response to Organic Search Trends

Traditional brand tracking data have been used by marketing managers for decades to understand consumer response to brands. Marketers and advertisers are highly enthusiastic about the opportunities that the new online tool Google Insights for Search (IFS) provides to monitor “rising searches” and analyze consumer search trends. IFS augments traditional brand tracking data in unprecedented ways, but is important for another reason: Google Insights for Search does not only monitor trends, it can influence them. We theorize that organic search results provide a natural measure of the attention being directed toward a brand in a social sphere, quite distinct from measures derived from brand tracking studies, and propose that consumers are influenced by observing IFS trend results, and infer brand attitudes of social groups from which these results were drawn. These inferred social attitudes then influence the consumer’s own attitudes through a social contagion effect. To test these ideas, we propose a two-stage project. First, we validate that aggregate user search history (IFS) correlates with traditional brand tracking metrics (WPP). The validation stage will establish that organic search trends relate to consumer brand attitudes at the aggregate level. Second, we use six design factors and a series of experiments to investigate under what conditions – and by what processes consumer brand attitudes, attitudes toward the ad, and related market response measures can be influenced by observation of brand search trends. The results will show how marketers and advertisers can organize organic search results to enhance consumer engagement with the brand and the search process. Our research also opens the door to important investigations of the impact on attitudes of search trends derived from social networks or other socially segmented online audience groups such as social shopping sites. The proposed research will also extend our knowledge of the social contagion process to online search more generally, arguably the most important online consumer behavior.