Chase recently acquired beleaguered bank Washington Mutual. An article on AdAge.com noted that this deal was very different from normal acquisitions because rather than waiting six or more months for the deal to close, the deal closed the day of the offer and Washington Mutual branches are already being rebranded. With little time for telephone surveys, the traditional means of doing brand research, this offers an excellent opportunity to look at online brand attributes and relative online brand strength to see what insight Internet usage data can offer.
Internet search data can be a terrific indicator of online brand strength. The following chart shows the share of US Internet searches for “chase”, “wamu” and “washington mutual” on a weekly basis for the past three years.

Chase enjoyed the stronger online brand strength (based on share of US Internet searches) from April 2006 to August 2007. Washington Mutual overtook Chase in June 2008. However, Chase appears to have a broader brand breadth than Washington Mutual, as measured by Search Term Suggestions.
In the four weeks to 6th September 2008 (the week before Washington Mutual’s serious troubles went public, there were 641 different search terms that included the words “washington mutual”, 783 with “wamu” and 2,950 with “chase”. Looking at those search terms, it is clear that both Washington Mutual (and Wamu) and Chase are associated with banking, credit cards, online banking, mortgages, loans and student loans.
Chase is more strongly associated with auto finance and home finance while there are more searches for Washington Mutual branch locations, free checking and cd rates.
Market Share Growth Through Acquisition of Different Customer Profile
The financial crisis has led some of the better protected (and lucky?) banks to look for opportunities to expand market share at reduced prices. Chase’s motivation was surely to expand market share and Hitwise data indicates that the two brands attract a very difference audience. This is good news for Chase as they are acquiring a new audience to which to market their products.
Looking at Hitwise Demographic data I can see that visitors to the Washington Mutual website are more likely to be men, from Washington, California or Florida, earning a household income of less than $60,000 than Chase.com visitors. The following two bar charts illustrate the difference nicely showing the percentage of visits to each site by age group and household income.

This is a great example of how Internet usage data can be used to inform business decisions. In this case, Internet usage data points to overlaps and opportunities for the brand as well as a fundamental difference in the audience for both banks.