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.

Ch. 15 - Retailing

Google is a search engine, not a store, but it is increasingly inching into e-commerce with products like its comparison-shopping service, Google Shopping. Shoppers are savvier than ever. They use social recommendations, web searches and smartphone apps to make informed purchase decisions. So how can a retailer stand out and get a shopper’s attention? Retailers can now add promotions to their product listings on Google Shopping to make them stand out. In addition, they can distribute their promotions on other Google properties such as Google Maps for Android and the Google Offers app, and attract shoppers to their store. In a few simple steps retailers can create a promotions list, map it to the right products in Google Shopping and upload to Google Merchant Center.  Our system supports user specific redemption codes and associated reporting, enabling retailers to measure the performance of each promotion. Google has recently changed Google Shopping to require e-commerce companies to pay to be included in shopping results, so product listings are now ads. Inclusion used to be free. Although some retailers agree, and say the move could even help their sales, others are panicking. Some say they will not pay for listings or will include fewer products, which could shrink the selection shoppers see on Google. The move is a way for Google to make more money from retailers, some of its most lucrative advertisers, but it also needs to improve product listings to keep valuable customers from going to Amazon. “Google and Amazon both have the same end goal, to be the destination that people go to to do their product searches, and Amazon’s winning that battle,” said Michael Griffin, founder and chief technology officer of Adlucent, which does search marketing for online retailers and formerly managed Amazon’s paid search.

Ch. 6 - Consumer Decision Making

Consumer behavior is an important consideration when constructing a marketing plan. Businesses that cannot understand how a consumer's mind works will have a more challenging time trying to figure out how to target a campaign that will attract or catch attention. Can the internet search giant distribute market and support hardware? The search giant will sell a phone subsidized by a wireless carrier, probably T-Mobile. The Google-branded Nexus One smartphone is set to launch early January. It's a radical departure for an internet advertising company built on search terms and text ads to enter the low-margin, cut-throat hardware business. Of course this increases the rivalry with apple, as they already compete on browsers and desktop and mobile operating systems. Google’s product will have a long way to go before it can reach the iphone, and of course Google has none of Apple's chops in marketing, retail and customer support, but, analysts and partners say, don't put it past Google to draw on its rich arsenal of brand power and sheer will to disrupt and experiment. Analysts say if Google was serious about selling phones in mass quantities to consumers directly, it would have to quickly ramp up its consumer-marketing efforts.

Ch. 5 - Developing a Global Vision

Google's chief executive stated in Berlin that the company plans to extend its Web television service, Google TV, 1from US viewers to global consumers starting in 2011. Samsung Electronics Co., the world’s largest television manufacturer, said that it will make sets run by Google’s TV android software to compete with Sony and Apple in the market for televisions that can access the internet, movies, shows, and games online. In May 2000, Google launched the first foreign language versions starting with 10 European languages. By September of the same year, it expanded to include Chinese, Korean and Japanese.
It opened its first international office in Tokyo in August 2001, and in October 2004, it opened an office in Dublin, Ireland, It's workers were multilingual Googlers that serviced its customers across multiple time zones and languages. Google bought android in 2005, even though they didn't announce that they were going to join the mobile device market. The advantage for Google of developing an operating system, rather than a Google phone, was that many manufacturers could adopt the platform. Motorola, Samsung and LG were among the first brands to use the Android platform. As of Sept 2012 Google owns 81.8% of the search engine market share. Followed by bing with 8.37%.