As I’ve noted a couple times about Google China copying Baidu in trying to surpass Baidu to become market leader within five years with dubious efforts in really understanding the Chinese market, Redline China (Pearl Research) conducted a study seeing how aware the Chinese people are about Google:

Based on interviews with the Chinese youth demographic, Google continues to struggle with lower user awareness, compared to Chinese search engine Baidu. These findings are contained in consulting firm Pearl Research’s new report “Baidu vs. Google: A Study of Search Engine Preferences among Chinese Youth.” A sample of the report can be found here: http://www.redlinechina.com/main/images2/SAMPLE_PearlResearch_Baidu_versus_Google_analysis_0801.pdf

It looks like Google continues to struggle in the wrong areas–yes, it is working hard to be better than Baidu (and in many areas it already is), but what Google still seems to not understand is the belief that a foreign company cannot do as well as a domestic one.

Key findings of the report: - Google is thought of as a foreign service which is not as suitable for Chinese searches Our interviews indicate that many Chinese youth chose to use Baidu over Google because they believe Baidu is a domestic product and thus should be better at indexing Chinese content.

When you see results like this, that means its time to start advertising within China to fight the perception through all marketing channels, even in channels that Google has previously forsaken (eg: TV advertising). Look, no matter how much better Betamax was over VHS, VHS understood the market was there in taping the full length of football games rather than having to put in two Betamax’s.

Sometimes superior products or services lose out to a competitor that can capitalize on what consumers actually want. Until Google understand this, it will always be second to Baidu.