The other day I was talking about the Unique Selling Proposition and how valuable it is when a marketer can distinguish itself by claiming a benefit or feature that cannot easily be claimed by another marketer. I mentioned that often you can do that simply by staking a claim to a generic benefit nobody else is talking about… make it your own, and anybody who later says “we have that too” would look foolish.

Google, though we take them for granted today, has a pretty unusual marketing history: they climbed to the top in a competitive field (remember when we all searched with Altavista?) by just being better than everybody else. So it was so very appropriate that Google’s interface also looked different. So stark and simple, just that search box in the middle of a blank page. The drama of unused white space… never a better example.

So now we have the new Google interface that has left this behind. You get a busy page with results in the middle, Adwords on the right, and a menu of related results on the left. But more important, you get a page that looks like everybody else’s search results page.

Not many marketers can claim the high ground that Google legitimately appropriated with its old page. To voluntarily cede your USP…. for that is what they are doing with this new generic interface… is a bone headed decision.

It occurred to me as I was thinking about this that  grandfather was a proud member of the Dallas Bonehead Club. I am not sure of all they did but I know a core value was to be silly and irrelevant. Good for them in that straight laced Southern business community, maybe not so good in today’s competitive business envronment. Bad move, Google.

Bing is the Mac OS of the search world. (Yep, that’s ironic.) It only has a small market share, but those users have become so loyal that it has to be considered in any search marketing plan. Succeeding against all odds when other search engines were becoming an afterthought, Bing did it the same way as Google: an innovative software algorithm.

Now, Bing is taking on another Google property with its enhanced Streetside which was introduced at CES 1010. This is like Google Maps combined with Google’s directory features, but with more information and better organized. If you’re looking at a restaurant, for example, you can see ratings from a variety of sources and an aggregate quality score.

Yet what is most cool is the Photosynth feature, which allows multiple users to contribute their own visuals of a landmark which are then stitched together to enable a 3D view that can be much more information-rich than Google’s Streetview. For a heavily documented site, like the Rome Coliseum in the example, you can zoom in on a detail and do a virtual walkaround.

I shot a video with a demo of Streetside by a Microsoft boother. The really cool stuff, demoing Photosynth, is toward the end.

In an earlier post I talked about the argument for spending more to gain market share when others are cutting back, and cited Bed, Bath & Beyond and New York Life as success stories. Now comes news that Google, Juniper Networks, Cisco and Microsoft have launched major new campaigns into a still-roiling economy. “Everyone is trying to be the first mover,” commented Dean Crutchfield at one of the major tech agencies. “This is a market now where you’ll stand out or die.”

Coincidentally, Google’s Q3 revenue was up 7% year-to-year, in spite of tough economic times. Somebody is spending more on Adwords, that’s for sure. How about your company?