• Marketing Pilgrim, Monday, November 26, 2007 2:30 PM

Gareth Davies packs a wealth of insight from the "Understanding Searcher Needs and Intent" panel at last week's SMX London. Chaired by Gord Hotchkiss, the panel also included Jonty Kelt of DoubleClick, Sara Andresson from Global Strategies International and Tom Ally of ASK -- and each provided their take on the psychological and tactile needs of searchers.

For example, Hotchkiss' presentation focused on the fact that consumers (or researchers) only have a limited number of "slots" in their head for a specific product or category, and often those slots are pre-filled with products that have somehow established brand affinity.

Meanwhile Andresson broke searchers down into four "mindsets": from brand enthusiast to brand aware, brand agnostic and the functionality adopter -- each with a different kind of query for the same product.

Kelt compared paid and natural search (determining that "paid search is to advertising as natural search is to PR") and took attendees through an inverted pyramid-style, search-driven purchase funnel.

Ally served up data from an Ask-sponsored study of some 2,000 users, noting trends in the information they typically searched for and differences (or lack thereof) between male and female search intent.

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