White label search
Mobile search has been identified as the next key battleground for ownership of the user and increasing take rates for data services. But, Michael Brady asks, do operators really need to relinquish brand loyalty and revenue opportunity?
better portals, improved mobile search is emerging as the capability that separates the conquerors from the vanquished. Creating a portal structure that will allow each unique user with their own personal tastes to have easy access to the ever-growing amount of content options is a specialised task that demands precision and technological excellence.
This being the case, operators should think long and hard before outsourcing this critical need to a third party search provider with a gigantic brand identity.
Operators are surely in danger of diluting their own brands and customer loyalty efforts by partnering with Goliaths such as Google and Yahoo! The question must be asked about whether this is the first step on a slippery slope to operators becoming a bit pipe for other businesses, rather than owning and profiting from the customer relationship themselves.
When building a search strategy, an operator must take into consideration not only the short-term value of building its own brand, but also the long term implications of creating search expertise within its own organisation. Without building their own branded expertise in search early on, mobile operators who outsource search to the giants risk becoming beholden to them once consumer habits have been formed.
Operators may be in a position of strength in today’s mobile environment with regard to what gets on their portals, but this may not hold true in the future. Search engine companies could end up owning the relationship with the customer, while the operator loses control over the economic environment of its portal. Microsoft and Yahoo! underestimated the importance of search in the traditional internet and have spent billions of dollars trying to recover from this costly error. Operators have the chance to avoid this same mistake, but need to act fast to secure this critical touch point with their consumers.
The alternative to outsourcing search is to harness the power of enterprise search technology. Enterprise search platforms deliver a ‘white-label’ search experience that can be tuned to the needs of the mobile operator.
A robust enterprise search platform has technical capabilities that are superior to a branded search engine. Moreover, the search platform allows operators to control the search experience based on their individual business models and particular brand identities.
This means building a search solution that appropriately promotes the content inside the “walled garden” and allows for searching the World Wide Web from mobile handsets, if this is part of the strategy. It is no surprise that some commentators have questioned the way operators have relinquished the ‘front door’ of the World Wide Web to branded third party search engines while not focusing on the content within their control.
Ultimately, leveraging an enterprise search platform with the tools designed directly for an operator delivers immediate and recognisable ROI, because it directly supports the operator’s own business drivers, such as subscriber growth, churn reduction, advertising and commerce models.
Operators need to have the flexibility to adjust their revenue models as market conditions change. Once flat rate charging, already available in Japan, hits Europe it will cap a portion of operator revenues. Therefore, revenue from user-downloaded content and the emerging advertising market will become an even more important part of an operator’s business model. Organisations that outsource to a Google or Yahoo! will be losing parts of this incremental revenue opportunity.
Enterprise search vendors avoid treading on operators’ territory. The best mobile search technology purposely doesn’t have a brand, so the operator owns the full user relationship. The value of this proposition is already being validated in the mobile industry, where subscribers report that enterprise search tools have reduced the average click-throughs needed to find and purchase content they like, resulting in enhanced usage and increased revenue.
Mobile search can – and does – deliver results. At the end of the day, the question that operators need to ask themselves is whether or not they want customer loyalty to be with the operator carrying the white label search solution, or with a branded search engine that also siphons potential revenue opportunities.