Ch. 7 - Business Marketing

Marketing at Google starts with technology and ends with the user, bringing both together in unconventional ways. Google works to demonstrate how its products solve the world's problems--from the everyday to the epic, from the mundane to the monumental. Google is looking to become the premier partner to small businesses globally. Google wants to help small businesses owners become even more successful with their business - from getting online, to running their business, to getting more customers as a Product Marketing Manager for the SMB Marketing team. Keeping your business growing has radically changed in recent years, especially as the economy has been hit so hard. Today, if your business can’t be found on the Internet, you are missing a lot of potential customers, profitable customers. Google introduced a smart, innovative and quite risky business model - Adwords - and the pay per click concept. The risk proved winning, and the innovative business model worked. Still today Adwords is the main source of revenues of Google Inc. Google became a powerhouse with an impressive pipeline of new great products - Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Video, and Gmail. And slim revenues.

Ch. 8 - Segmenting and Targeting Markets

Google is closing in on holding all power over the Internet, Computers, and personal data. They set their eye on several potential markets and have essentially dominated them all. Of course, the Google search engine is their most prized possession, but their efforts in other markets are not going unnoticed. Microsoft and Yahoo have made numerous attempts to impact Google’s power in search engine dominance, but they have fallen short time and time again. Bing and Yahoo are still very mildly used when compared to Google. Its simplicity and ease of use have made it the go-to solution. After years of people getting comfortable with Google, it’s almost impossible for another competitor to take over. Search engines are the most powerful thing on the Internet and Google basically owns the market and will for the foreseeable future. By owning the world’s most commonly used search engine, Google controls all aspects of online marketing. Customers search for products and services through Google every single day. Some keyword phrases receive millions of monthly searches. For Google, that means prime advertising for businesses that want to showcase their services at the top of Google. Everything you find through Google isn’t a paid advertisement though, that would just be cruel. There are two sections when you search on Google. There are paid ads along the top and right side, and there are organic rankings in the middle. For website owners, everything you do for your website will be to impress Google and enhance your organic rankings. If that’s not quick enough for you, those paid advertisements are your next option.

Ch. 11 - Developing and Managing Products

Google is toiling to create some blockbuster successes beyond its Internet search engine. Carl Sjogreen, who led the development of Google Calendar, provided a deep look into how Google develops products during a presentation at The Future of Web Apps Summit.  What follows is a play-by-play of his presentation, which is self-explanatory. Search-engine giant Google has a secret product lab called Google X feverishly developing blue-sky projects such as space elevators, driverless cars and internet-enabled household devices, The New York Times reports. The labs are reportedly run "as mysteriously as the CIA," according to unnamed sources familiar with the project, and housed in two facilities - one in California at the company's headquarters and one in an undisclosed location elsewhere in the country. "They're pretty far out in front right now," Rodney Brooks, a professor emeritus at MIT's computer science and artificial intelligence lab and founder of Heartland Robotics, told the Times. "But Google's not an ordinary company, so almost nothing applies." The lab is reported to be filled with robotics engineers, in spite of the software engineers more commonly employed by the company. But don't get your hopes up: The types of projects cited aren't the sort of thing the company will be releasing anytime soon. Space elevators, for example, are a concept common in science fiction stories and movies. The idea is simple: Ditch the expensive, dangerous rockets for a giant platform that tows anything and everything up a tremendous cable to a platform orbiting at a fixed location around the planet.

Ch. 16 -Integrated Marketing Communications

At the IABC luncheon in Regina, Adam Green, Agency Lead for Google Canada, spoke to us about online marketing. When Google speaks, it’s worth listening. Adam covered a lot of ground in an hour, but the highlights were — think mobile, social and local. Adam pointed out how fast the web has grown and is continuing to grow, “When Google was founded in 1998 about 2% of the world’s population had Internet access. Today, 1 in 4 have access. That’s the same amount that own TVs. And that’s a huge shift.” If you’re building your marketing strategy, the future is a mobile web. And social media should not be ancillary to your online marketing strategy. Adam explained Google’s concept of the Zero Moment of Truth . You may have heard of “the first moment of truth”, a Procter & Gamble term to describe the moment when we stand at the store shelf and choose between all the brands before us. The moment is so important, Procter & Gamble invests millions researching displays and packaging. Google’s Zero Moment of Truth, suggests an equally (perhaps even more) important moment, before we go to the store – when we search for deals or product information online. The importance of that moment is substantiated with a study showing 83% of us have made up our mind before we even enter the store. So as Adam said “if you’re not online, you’ve already lost the battle. This leads to the importance of social media and mobile marketing. Social Media, not only helps your search results, but it also affects the moment of truth. Following a purchase, social media gives us the opportunity to share our opinions, and because of social integration like the Facebook Like button, and Google’s +1, one person’s online review becomes another person’s Zero Moment of Truth. Google, like Facebook, has moved into opening the social graph, so that recommendations to your social media network move outside of your Facebook wall or Google circle. Social is going to appear in everything we do online. The Google +1 and the Facebook Like button put your social recommendations in search, in ads, and on shopping websites. And these recommendations don’t just happen once, They stay there. They are persistent. Google, because of its size, innovation, and market position, has a number of competitive advantages. Google’s competitive advantage go into three main categories consisting of infrastructure, innovative services, and market share. First, Google has an incredibly powerful infrastructure is not easily replicated. Just like Wal-Mart is known for having highly efficient supply chain infrastructure with a massive investment in plant assets and equipment including transport vehicles, enormous warehouse facilities, and high tech inventory systems, Google has a vast technology infrastructure.

 

 

Ch. 10 - Product Concepts

The product concept proposes that consumers will prefer products that have better quality, performance and features as opposed to a normal product. The concept is truly applicable in some niches such as electronics and mobile handsets. Two companies which stand apart from the crowd when we talk about the product concept are Apple and Google. Both of these companies have striven hard on their products and deliver us feature rich, innovative and diverse application products and people just love these brands. For the first time in Google history, nearly all of its applications were redesigned to be more focused, elastic, and effortless. Created in partnership with Jesse Kaczmarek, this redesign establishes a unified and modern visual direction for Google suite of products and became the foundation for the brand’s refresh. About a month ago, shortly after Google surpassed the 40 million user mark and completed its hundredth product feature release, the company finalized its initial feature set and opened its social media platform to the public. Google has released a concept video of a new product it is working on called Project Glass. Apparently the progress is far enough along that the company felt it was safe to share the product in a concept video and gather user feedback on what people would like to see in the hypothetical product.

Chapter 18. Sales Promotion and Personal Selling

It is surprising that Google has become the world’s largest search engine when the promotion strategy of the company relies heavily on viral, or referral, marketing. Google has gained consumer loyalty and in turn Google customers recommend Google to their friends. Its minimal homepage and knack for gaining consumer trust through a “morally superior” advertisement policy. Google promotes its services and products by purchasing its own AdWords internet ads and through its own Google channel on YouTube. An example of Google’s minimal internet advertising strategy was when they released Google Chrome. When it comes to Google Apps, the company has gone a little further in their advertising campaign through the use of television ads, the most notable being those for the Android mobile phone platform, sales promotions, and other public installations. It is safe to assume that Google relies heavily on internet advertising and viral marketing. Google’s reputation and brand has gained clout because of their dedication to simplicity. While Google customers generally do not have to purchase Google products, the company still manages to give the public incentives for their loyalty and promote how superior the Google brand truly is. Google’s massive “Going Google” campaign included a “use promotion” that awarded customers with premiums for their product testimonials. Google also sponsored “a $30 million competition for an unmanned lunar landing. It is easy to say that sales promotions are a little more difficult to pull off for a predominantly internet based company due to the sheer fact that Google offers majority of its products for free. While there Is a very short list of Google’s sales promotions activities, the company has used these seemingly small opportunities to increase brand awareness among consumers.

Ch. 17 - Advertising and Public Relations

As we all may know Google makes most of its revenue from online ads. Google’s ad revenue climbed 16 percent year-over-year, and 5 percent from the previous quarter. That’s because the number of ads it showed went up – 21.6 percent in the case of AdWords and 29.1 percent for its display ads. Google is now making $3 billion a month in advertising — the majority of which comes from little text ads next to search results. In 2000, Google launched a keyword-targeted advertising program called AdWords, revolutionizing the online advertising industry. AdWords made search engine marketing (SEM) effective. AdWords showed ads on Google.com that were related to a person’s specific search. Google disallowed pop-up and pop-under ads of any kind. The success of AdWords allows Google to provide many free services (including its top-ranked search service). In the 20th century, advertisers diversified their advertising across many mediums – such as TV, radio, print, and billboards – to promote their products or services. This diversification is referred to as a marketing mix. As people began spending more time online, the Internet became another channel via which advertisers can market their goods. Advertisers design AdWords ads to target the user’s search (or wants or needs), matching ads to the user’s query. Advertisers fi rst choose keywords that relate to their website or product offerings. Then, when a user enters the same or similar keywords into Google, the advertiser’s ads are shown. Price and other factors also play a part in ad display.A team within the Google[x] group started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment.Project Glass is a research and development program by Google to develop an augmented reality head-mounted display (HMD). Project Glass products would display information in smartphone-like format hands-free and could interact with the Internet via natural language voice commands. The prototype's functionality and minimalist appearance (aluminum strip with 2 nose pads) has been compared to Steve Mann's EyeTap.