Not only Google: the Chinese BAIDU is also late to the AI race. (Photo: Unsplash)
"Anticipation has the habit to set you up for disappointment" (anticipation has the habit to set you up for disappointment) is how the first song on the first album of the beloved British rock band Arctic Monkeys opens.
Although this album was released in 2006, today, 17 years later, this line is more relevant than ever.
This month the Chinese search engine company BAIDU introduced its version of ChatGPT to the world.
The bot, called ERNIE, was revealed in a live presentation, and didn't really impress investors with its language or math skills.
The result: the shares of the Chinese company fell by 10% after the presentation (but they managed to recover in the meantime).
If this case sounds familiar to you, it's probably because the exact same thing happened to Google when it failed miserably with the Bard chatbot.
The unsuccessful launch led to a direct drop in trade and an unprecedented image damage.
Not on the AI alone
And speaking of Google, how can we not mention the Google Pixel 7 Pro?
Reviews and experts have been praising this smartphone for weeks, only to find that Google's flagship device suffers from a series of bizarre glitches such as a volume button that falls out of place, calls that suddenly disconnect, and a keyboard that doesn't appear on initial startup of the device.
When moving away from the field of technology, you can also mention the failure of CNN, which you may not have heard of, and that is exactly the problem!
A year ago, April 2022 Warner Brothers.
Discovery announced the closure of its streaming service, CNN+ just a month after launch, after the $300 million service it launched drew less than 10,000 viewers a day.
This is a huge failure, especially when it comes to one of the biggest news companies in the world, which is owned by the studios that made the Harry Potter movies, the Looney Tunes, Batman and the list goes on.
So why did CNN+ fail?
Because sometimes a product fails not because it is not good or bad, but because it is not needed or because it has no unique value points (USP).
And the expectations?
They are not necessarily defined by the company but often by the market.
BAIDU did not declare that its product is necessarily better than ChatGPT (except for everything related to understanding Chinese culture) - we expected it to be so, because otherwise, why would we use it?
Even in the case of CNN+, in a world where Netflix spends billions of dollars on publishing quality and new content every week, even if you are Warner Brothers, it is not certain that you will be able to meet the expectations of the consumer.
When expectations hit the timing
Going back to Baidu's case, it seems that the company was forced to release its chatbot at a wrong time for them.
Since OPEN AI released ChatGPT to the world, the world of artificial intelligence has become a concoction of new developments in the field and every day new players enter the game.
Baidu, which is considered the "Chinese Google", sees all the estimates and bets that ChatGPT will replace Google and change the field of search engines, and understands that it must act quickly.
This caused her to prematurely release her chatbot, instead of giving it another "5 minutes in the oven".
It seems that in this case Baidu faced a double expectation and was actually between a rock and a hard place: on the one hand, it has to release a product that is better or at least equal in level to ChatGPT, and on the other hand, it has to release the product as quickly as possible.
This caused her to release a chatbot that did not meet expectations, and damaged her image and stock.
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In conclusion
Expectations are a double-edged sword for a product.
It is understood that the marketer wants to create buzz and expectations around his product, but excess expectations can lead to disappointment and a painful fall.
Sometimes the excess of expectations is not caused by aggressive or excessive marketing of the product, but by the nature of the market and the extensive competition in it.
In a dynamic market where new developments are introduced as news to controllers, timing is everything.
The author is Attorney Reot Goldman, CEO of the Geometrics Group, a member of the "Helsinki" committee at Blinson Hospital, and a member of the board of trustees of the Schneider Children's Hospital
Marketing and digital
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