5 Questions with Joe Chin, CEO of Guidester
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | September 19, 2006 | Share This
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If you’ve ever gone into a store to buy a “small digital camera” and come out with the $799 “8mpx D50 Outfit DX-format 3.8x optical zoom LSI processor system”… then Joe Chin is your new best friend. His company, Guidester, provides online retailers with tools that help customers decide what to buy. You may have seen one of Guidester’s survey tools, like this one at Circuit City. After asking a series of questions about what you want to buy, Guidester narrows down the available products that meet your criteria. Though currently only available for consumer electronics, the year-old company is hoping to expand to over 200 product categories. We got the chance to catch up with Joe and quiz him about the What, Why and Where of Guidester - and exactly How he came up with such a helpful product.
1. Guidester is the 2005 re-brand of an older company (Decidia) that sold web-based decision tools to e-tailers. What major changes did you make in the transition from Decidia to Guidester, and what motivated the change?
The most notable change was to our business model. Whereas we once charged retailers for our decision tools – tools which are proven to increase sales, decrease returns and improve customer loyalty, satisfaction and retention – we now provide Guidesters to our retail partners (Circuit City, CompUSA, Buy.com, etc.) at no charge.We also added a unique advantage for product manufacturers (Olympus, H-P, Casio, etc.) which enables them to have their products prominently displayed to consumers during and at the completion of searches. Our “sponsored match” model makes it possible for manufacturers to ensure their products are displayed at the top of results lists instead of just randomly appearing somewhere in the list. Essentially our model is analogous to paid search placement in search engines.
We also improved and increased the number of the tools themselves. Guidesters are more powerful than ever and cover more products than we previously did.
In regard to the motivation behind the change, there were really two reasons. One, we felt the paid search model was more flexible and scalable than our old enterprise model. And two, we saw the success Google and Yahoo! were having with paid search, and realized it quite naturally applied to our business. Since we moved to the new model our business has grown considerably and we’re tracking a vastly improved growth and revenue trajectory. However, throughout the change, we never deviated from our original mission which is to help consumers make better buying decisions.
2. Guidester’s advantage is its ability to translate complex technical differences into understandable language for the consumer. In other words, you help people differentiate between items with complex, but similar, attributes. This might explain why Guidester’s applications are focused exclusively on consumer electronics. Do you think Guidester’s technology can be applied to other markets, and if so, what might they be?
Guidester tools do indeed help people better understand how to choose and purchase complex products with confusing features like digital cameras and home theater systems, but they’re also remarkably effective in managing categories where the products aren’t complicated but rather there’s just innumerable options to choose from. We have identified somewhere on the order of 200 product/service categories ranging from the most technologically challenging right through to the most basic, and our plan is to move into more and more categories over the course of the next two to three years. In the near future you’ll see Guidesters for insurance, mutual funds and cell phones, but also for vacations, apparel, baby products – even tires and motor oil.
3. As the PPC ad market gets more and more fragmented, it becomes harder for marketers to justify using fringe products. Google, Yahoo! and MSN succeed because their products are so similar, and can be tracked and tagged collectively. How easy is it for advertisers to use the data feeds they’re providing for other shopping programs with the Guidester tool?
Allowing advertisers to integrate Guidester into their existing processes is essential to the success of our company. Having said that however, there is a basic difference between an advertising buy from Google or Yahoo!, where traffic is acquired, and one from Guidester, where customers are influenced at the point of purchase and the traffic is organic. Because of this fundamental difference, integration of the Guidester network into the Google, Yahoo! and MSN data feeds is important and needs to be thought through very carefully. We are working to make that a reality as quickly as possible. And we do already offer powerful tracking tools so advertisers can monitor the success of their campaigns on their own, in real-time, and across the entire Guidester network.
But we don’t see ourselves as a fringe product, we see ourselves as an important addition to e-commerce sites. In fact, we believe that e-tailers that don’t offer decision tools (of course ideally ours) will be abandoned for those which do. Moving forward, consumers will demand this kind of functionality and service and will naturally gravitate towards sites which offer it.
4. You work directly with most of your advertiser clients, rather than encouraging them to work through a search marketing company. Is there a benefit to working with clients directly, and do you think you’ll keep this model for the long term?
We actually have an equitable mix of both direct-to-client relationships and SEM-to-client relationships (for example, our relationship with Olympus would be classified as the former and our relationship with H-P as the latter). We appreciate the value an experienced search engine marketing company brings to the equation in managing a PPC campaign, and welcome inquiries from agencies that realize the advantages of Guidester tools and feel confident recommending us to their clients. We also of course reach out to, and, field and address inbound calls from the ad departments of product manufacturers.
5. Guidester is a B2B company starting up in the middle of a P2P boom — where accessibility, consumer-generated media, widgets, and user-friendly applications rule the market. Will Guidester one day follow suit, and give users access to data to reconfigure & share the system?
Great question – and the answer is a definitive yes. Harnessing the insight of the consumer population has and always will be directly in line with our business vision. Our goal is to be the market leader in helping consumers make more informed and satisfying purchase decisions using the best technology, information and expertise available. That’s been our core mission from the very beginning.
Topics: ECommerce, Interviews, SEM: Ad Creative, SEM: Paid Inclusion, Technology |