Poaching Behavior In Kevword Advertising And Its Impact On Brand Cognition From The Perspective Of Users

The advent of search engine marketing (SEM) has had a tremendous effect on online advertising with a good cost performance, while keyword advertising is the dominant form in SEM. Keyword advertising is critical as a revenue stream, providing the revenue base for major search engines, such as Google and Baidu, and appears to be their major business model for the foreseeable future. What’s more, it serves the purpose of building consumer brand awareness and increasing advertiser’s market piercing rate.In recent years, a controversy has gained notoriety worldwide, in both the international court systems and the media. It concerns a form of potential bait and switch advertising.When a consumer searching the brand name of one company; he or she will be presented with an advertisement by a competitor or retailer of the searched-for brand. We refer to this practice as-Poaching. In other words, competing firms can use sponsored search to free-ride on the awareness-building efforts of other firms by directly advertising on their keywords and therefore poaching their customers, that helps to target consumers in a later stage of the purchase process.Anecdotal evidence shows that such poaching is a frequent occurrence. However, related article and study are extremely limited, and most research focus on describing this phenomenon and have not involved in explaining the reason why poaching happens. In recent years, some articles have only discussed the benefits that poachers can get from poaching behavior, but these articles are all in the perspective of poachers or searching service provider. There is no study exploring how search engine users will react in this phenomenon. Thus, in this paper, we focus on the understudied yet important aspect of the keyword search advertising--brand poaching, and investigate how it affects the brand relevance evaluation of poachers from the view of users.During this study, we based on the previous research in the field of keyword advertising and poaching behavior, and then explore searchers relevance evaluation mechanism about poachers after they adopting poaching behavior. We try to explain searchers’evaluation result with the assist of assimilation and contrast effect. Concretely, we select three factors (rank, brand awareness and the relation between poachers and brand holders.)This article employed empirical study and collected326reliable questionnaires by conducting two filed experiments eventually. At last, we take advantage of SPSS to analyze these data and reach5conclusions below.(1) Brand awareness has a significant effect in relevance evaluation.(2)The interactive effect between brand awareness and rank only happens in strong poaching condition.(3)Retailers can acquire high relevance evaluation than competitors.(4) Search engine users’recall of unknown brand has no significant relation with rank or poacher’s type, when searchers have high search involvement and skills.