Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Resurgence of Searchandising Lingo

I stumbled across several citations of the term “searchandising” recently, indicating that this term is rearing its head once again.


Here’s a June 30th quote from an SLI-Systems press release: "We're pleased that the new console provides us the tools needed to match our customers' needs with our business goals through more flexible 'searchandising'."

Earlier in June, several mainstream news sites including CNN Money, DM News and Click Z picked up on a multi-vendor PR push featuring Overstock that announced: “Omniture, Inc. (NASDAQ: OMTR), Bazaarvoice and Mercado today announced that Overstock.com is using integrated solutions from the three companies through Omniture Genesis to employ a strategy called "searchandising" -- the utilizing of on-site search terms, user-generated product reviews and analytics to optimize product merchandising and relevance.”

Coincidentally, I just spoke with Geoff Atkinson of Overstock, who upon prompting, commented that they started integrating data from all three sources to remove as much guess work as possible from their merchandising tactics. Their ultimate goal is to automate the process and dynamically generate as much content as possible. He went on to say that all three vendors are great partners for Overstock and have never said no to any of their ideas, allowing them to pioneer new opportunities.
Finally, an interview with the eCommerce Director of Vermont Teddy Bear in early June 2008 also featured use of searchandising in paraphrase format by eM+c Magazine: “Since deploying SLI Systems [the searchandising solution provider Vermont Teddy Bear chose for its site], we have seen an increase in traffic to all three of our sites and have improved customer service because site visitors can now easily find what they're looking for.”

I published the term back in March of 2007 in an eCommerce Times article and was issued a friendly cease and desist letter from Offermatica that turned out not to hold water. Despite the fact that my article still ranks highest on Google's SERP for the keyword “searchandising", it appears that Mercado filed for a trademark on the buzzy little term on July 9th, 2007.

So, is the term “searchandizing” just more marketing-speak or does the term resonate with you?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

John,

We coined the term in 2003 and tried to get a copyright on it. If you go to USPTO, you will see the application back then.

Unfortunately, something went wrong with the application and we weren't aware of it.

As near as we can tell, nobody used it prior to then.

To the extent it matters, we coined it to refer to tuning your merchandising to enhance search results and landing page performance - notably in Google/Yahoo.

Wish the copyright had help up, but such is life

Anonymous said...

Check out the upper left corner on this link:

http://www.forrester.com/FirstLook/Vertical/Issue/1,6454,87,00.html

John Lovett said...

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the insight and forewarning on double checking the work of your trademark attorney. Despite the loss of "searchandising", hopefully you're busy coining the next marketing buzzword.

We'll be listening!
Cheers,
John