beyondbrics

Google’s share of the Chinese online search market is plummeting, but the company’s staff in China comfort themselves with the thought that they are the champion of hearts. “The people love Google,” says John Liu, the company’s vice president for Greater China operations.

But it turns out that the Chinese people love Baidu more. According to WPP, the global marketing group, Chinese consumers have much stronger emotional ties to the brand of the local hero than to Google.

For a new ranking of China’s most valuable brands published Tuesday, Millward Brown, WPP’s research affiliate, surveyed 35,000 Chinese consumers. One key tool the researchers use for measuring a brand’s value is the ‘brand pyramid’. In five neat layers, it shows the percentage of consumers that are aware of the brand, that feel it is relevant to them, that believe in its performance, that believe in its advantages and that are “bonding” with it.

“While Google is much stronger than the global average, Baidu is much stronger than Google still,” says Adrian Gonzalez, who heads Millward Brown in Greater China.

The survey was done in 2009 before Google executed a partial retreat from China earlier this year: it confronted the Chinese government over censorship in January and moved its China web search to its Hong Kong site in March.

According to the brand experts’ research, Google came fairly close to Baidu in consumer awareness, and feelings of relevance and performance. But when it comes to judging the brand’s advantages, only 55 per cent of Chinese consumers believe in the Google brand while 77 per cent back Baidu. And only 15 per cent of Chinese consumers feel a bond with the Google brand, just one third of the percentage its local rival gets.

Related reading:
Google seeks way to rebalance in China, FT (Dec 6)
WikiLeaks in China: was the Politburo behind Google attacks?, beyondbrics (Nov 29)