“A Google shop? Now just what has Google diversified into?” That was my initial reaction when I went by this busy part of Causeway Bay (right opposite to the Sogo in case you’re familiar with the area) and spotted this.
Walking a little closer, it turns out that it was just their idea of marketing their Google Finance portal for Hong Kong, with some folks dishing out flyers and some demo computers in there.
Now there aren’t that many localised Google Finance portals up yet, but Hong Kong gets one. And rightly so, as this is a a country where there is a big, active, investing public that enjoys lunch time conversations about how their 0005 (HSBC) share prices are performing and you see people huddled in corners of banks over the terminals with numeric keypads checking their stock prices.
So this is one corner of Causeway Bay where you really can’t ask for any more human traffic – try giving away free coffee like what McDonalds did previously and just watch the people queue for it. But judging from the “crowd” at this “store”, it certainly didn’t seem like this marketing strategy was garnering much hits from the Causeway Bay crowd.
Which reminds me that just a couple of days ago, we were all reading about how Google had to let go of almost 200 sales and marketing folks … makes me wonder how they run Google Analytics for this campaign.
