Does It Pay to Get to the Top? Contextual Factors of Branding in Search Engine Marketing

Branding effect in search engine result pages (SERPs) is a critical yet unsolved issue in search engine marketing. Building on contextual branding literature, this research identifies key contextual factors conducive for brand building in SERPs. Using four experiments, the authors establish that Internet users possess a schema about the meaning of search engine rankings; and that their recognition of a lesser known brand will be higher when the brand is displayed before well- known brands in SERPs. The authors also discover that under conditions of priming, users with low Internet search skills tend to evaluate the lesser known brand more favorably along the primed attribute. The research has both theoretical and practical implications for building brands in the SERP setting.