4p's on Google

Pardon me if I have got things wrong. The comments section under this is waiting to hear your outbursts. All I m attempting to do is apply 4p’s of marketing to a company called Google. The idle mind has taken a toll on me and no wonder I am coming up with this.

Google has become a house hold name. I won’t have 2^nd thoughts even if I say that people have replaced the word ‘Search’ with ‘Google’. We get to hear the words like “Google’ it yaar more often now a days.

As we all know the 4 p’s of marketing are Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

Let’s try applying it to Google now.

Product: Google offers services as a form of it product to its customers. The products Google offer fall into industrial products i.e Google’s’ business products offer services to their customers. Things like advertising, providing their search technology to solve companies’ search problems within their office etc. They also sell something called as tangible items along with its service or make hybrid offers by selling “pure” products.

The three categories in which Google classifies their products are Advertising solutions, Business Solutions, and the Google Store. AdWords come in their Advertising solutions .Google offers text-based ads that are precise to the search on the site of the user and the customers pay Google every time internet search users click on their site. They help in increasing volume of visitors to the customer site’s hence setting up client’s site.

Well, Google has many products. Right from its search engine, G talk, analytics to Picasa. Google Store sells items such as shirts, notebooks, bags, caps etc to almost anything that they can print their company’s name on.

Place: Google’s place is the internet. No one does it better than Google when it comes to target their consumers, the people on the Internet. Google introduced the language limit in April 2000 with eleven languages. It was expanded as of Aug. 2000 to 24. As of July 2001, Russian was added. In Nov. 2001, Arabic and Turkish and then in early 2002 Catalan, Croatian, Indonesian, Serbian, Slovak, and Slovenian joined the group for the following 34 language limit options. These are available on the Advanced Search page and their Language Tools page. This shows that immaterial of any place across the globe, Google’s presence is felt.

With the intrusion of internet and 3g spectrum coming over to India, we can virtually see Google penetrating many households.

Price: Google’s price for AdWords is set on the amount of advertisement per day it provides its consumers. In Google’s case the list price is at five cents per day, however it can go as high as $50.00 per day. The price difference will depend on the amount of advertisement per day that the consumers are willing to pay and the amount of times individuals click to see the ads and how high these ads rank on a search page.

Apparently no price is charge to a normal user.

Promotion: Despite emerging onto the platter later than others, Google has risen to outdo all of its competitors becoming what is now the most popular Internet search engine. Google offers a minimal homepage and several people like the fact. It loads immediately without annoying advertisements. Lycos and AltaVista advertise heavily and load their homepage with flash. It takes a lot of time. People seem to like Google more because of its simple and direct approach. As a result of Google’s outstanding results it has compelled its dedicated users, using WOM (Word of mouth) to inform everyone else about their remarkable search engine. Google’s growth is proof of the power of viral marketing, without the need for massive advertising budgets. Recently, Google launched a new website called “Froogle,” which is a product search. Froogle is a separate site from Google. When Froogle was first introduced, Google did not display an advertisement or a link to Froogle. Rather, they relied on providing a quality free service and backing it with good public relations.

The Road ahead???

Google knows better.

All they have is the product part which they can constantly improve i.e by continue doing what they are doing so well and that is indexing and rating billions of web pages every day better than other search engine companies in this world.

An interesting fact shared by our prof is that the work break up of an employee at Google is as follows:

50%- KPI

30%- Things which are parallel to Google eg: G talk, Applications etc.

20%- Free time

So with this 50-30-20 outlook we can definitely see great work atmosphere at Google.

The world is going green. Google has to take care of its CSR activities and align them to the shift in the global trend. And the result??

They came up with lifting up of the huge data centers and storing them on ships!!! That’s true. This will help them to reduce the costs and keep the Green peace activists at bay.

The concept of reverse innovation may be applied where in they prepare a plan to kill one of their own products and find out ways about how to survive in such case. This way they will be prepared for an onslaught from market before hand and better prepared to handle the crisis.

So any takers for >5 rounds of interviews?????

Peace,

Sandeep