Ask Jeeves is Back! – the butler’s back in the UK!

Three years after making a critical online branding mistake, Ask Jeeves in Great Britain is back with a fancy new suit and good advice. Back in 1999 my firm (then BGDi) worked with the original founders of Ask Jeeves just before they went public to design a new identity system for Ask Jeeves.com. We developed a complex branding system and this really cool “ask” button. Jeeves was great as a search engine because he was, at the time, the only personality on the web.  Your own personal  adviser or helper for search– way before Google became the dominant player.

When Barry Diller, the president of InterActiveCorp, purchased the Ask.com business in 2005, he decided to dump Jeeves. I thought, what a big mistake. At the time the thinking was: become the best technology for search and move beyond the anachronistic image of a British servant. Wrong. Ever since, Ask.com has continually struggled to differentiate itself from other online search and the super cool technology of Ask.com has meant little to online loyalty or growth of the company.

Yes, the Jeeves brand element, has returned to center stage because Ask.com’s own research showed the British public  favored Jeeves 5 to 1 over just Ask.com. What’s so cool about this is that now with Twitter, Digg, Facebook and other social media Jeeves can actually “live” in real-time on the web and create a defined personality responding and talking to his community. This can only build a loyal following.

You can now go to either AskJeeves.co.uk or Ask.co.uk to check him out.  AND if you are a real Jeeves nut you can go to Ask.com and pick a Jeeves “skin” or just go to askjeeves.com and he will come up on the site.

Welcome back Jeeves!