Market Programs and the Marketing Mix of Google - Essay Example

? Google Company Google Incorporation has gone literary from a small company started in the year 1995by two computer university students in Stanford University to an innovative firm that hosts the employment of over 10,000 individuals and a market share of 40% (Guyette, 2007, p. 1). Google, through its mission statement, has a core mission of ensuring that the entire world has an easy and fast way of accessing data in the internet. They continually make data searchable from websites using the computers, phones and other gadgets. Google has marketing strategies that incorporates personality, non- profit, large and small business enterprises and have helped in the market share that the corporation controls. The company has attachments to education and libraries as part of their company culture as stated in Guyette, (2007, p. 2). This is a marketing approach implemented to improve the market share. Most of the students are loyal customers of Google and help improve their brand name all over the world. Other contributors to the market share are partnerships and a wide range of advertising done using Ad Words (Guyette, 2007, p. p. 2). Google’s plan is to make more acquisitions internationally to add on the products that people require and, therefore, fill that market gap and to be more competitive with the competitors in an effort of trying to catch up (Guyette, 2007, p. p. 2). Therefore, this paper focuses on the marketing strategies of Google while evaluating its internal and external environments. Introduction Google, the most popular search engine, was founded by two Stanford students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Because of its popularity, it has captured the market attributed to an industrious and innovative marketing plan team. Innovation is achieved by the many uses that google.com does to its customers who are the revenue earners of any organization as indicated by Fifield (2007, p. 23). The role of every organization is to achieve market success and this achievement is dependent on the customers’ preference. Thereby it is the role of the marketing departments in the organization to win the customers preference. Google has leverage over the other competitors who have led to its competitive advantage in the variety of uses that it grants the customer. The competitive advantage over the other firms instills focus to the marketing program of a firm as stated in Ferrell &Hartline (2011, p. 19). Google’s marketing strategy is evident on the fulfillment of the want s and needs that the customers desire. It has incorporated all the individuals, companies, organizations and any interested parties through segregation of these target groups as a marketing program in the market strategy. Through the use of its strengths and opportunities and constant awareness of weakness and threats imposed on it, the marketing strategy can be formulated matching the needs and requirements of the market ventured (Ferrell & Hartline, 2011, p. 19). Google controls 40% of the market and estimates to control 70% of the market in the near future. The control of the market varies according to countries. For Instance, in a country like France; Google takes 71% of the market share. This reduced market share is caused by the competitors in the market. In the US alone, Google controls 67% of the search market. This was achieved in November 2012 but dipped just slightly in December hitting 66.7% of market share (Goodwin, 2012, p. 2). This significant market dominance is a milestone for Google as a company and as a brand name despite all the competition. Goodwin (2012, p. 2) continues to explain the effect of the competitors on the search market. For example, Microsoft, even with the addition of Bing-powered searches, is way far behind Google. The competition between yahoo and Bing in the month of January 2012 significantly led to the rise of Google’s market share (Goodwin, 2012, p. 3). Google faces its competition from other companies that are to the same goal of giving people information on the web and providing them with the best advertising avenues. These include some traditional search engines like yahoo, Microsoft Corporation; e-commerce sites; social media sites; other forms of communication like the televisions, and online services providers. Pingdom (2010, p. 1) summarizes the competitors in a nutshell and concludes that Google competes with the internet and facing the internet is an overwhelming task for the Google’s management. Google uses various ways to relieve itself from the competition and improve its market share. Acquisitions are one of the ways to reduce competition and in the same breath improve its market share (Russell, 2011, p. 2). Google buys companies in a rate of 1 per week and poaching individuals from competitors, Russell (2011, p. 2), cites the words of a manager in the Google management as he explained the acquisition of technical people who help the company solve problems and therefore, reduce the competitors advances. Improving its market share also involves the practice in the pornography and data securing. As Russell (2011, p. 3), indicates, there is a large number of traffic to the pornography accounts and to improve the market share in these sites, Google deals with porn as an innovative way to capture these customers. The porn searches significantly give more revenue to Google since they are one of the leading sites in the world (Russell, 2011, p. 3). Google’s SWOT analysis Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that Google faces are mainly common to most of the technologies adapted in a competitive environment, and are the key variables to assess when holding a marketing strategy (Mbalectures 2010, p. 1). Strengths It is evident Google Incorporation is a large multinational company and enormous spending is done in advertising and internet searches. Google has employed a lot of innovative ways to assist in the online advertising market leading to its success as largest advertisers in the online market. Mbalectures (2010, p. 1) affirms the success of Google’s advertising to a tone of 99% revenue generation. Google’s mission statement has also been the driving force of the corporation since its start in 1995. The mission statement, “to systematize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” (Guyette, 2007, p. 2), has cultivated loyal employees and has attracted technicians from competitors. Guyette (2007, p. 2) also identifies translations allowing international use of their products and services. He also identifies the adaptability of products to many hardware platforms as a key strength to its success. Guyette (2007, p. 3), highlights the key significance of the partnership of Google Inc., MySpace, Apple and Sun to be a significant strength. Google has also had a lot of support from the educational systems around the world with the education systems adopting Google as a major tool of learning. This is one of the ways Google advertises its brand name (Guyette, 2007, p. 3). Weaknesses Though it has had significant successes, which led to its market share, Google has had a fair share of weaknesses. In countries like the US, the government under the justice department ordered a list of all searches in order to minimize and end the cases of pornographic material (Guyette, 2007, p. 3). Although it affects all the search engines, Google marketing strategy to improve its brand name through pornography was restricted. Google had found a gap to market its brand name through allowing pornography since it's one of the most searches. Google is known to poach technical experts from its competitors to improve its reliability. Unfortunately, most of the companies have future restrictions imposed on the employees. Concerns have also been brought out in Mbalectures (2010, p. 3) where Google has been involved in voluminous activities. These include Junk busters and the Double Click’s potential purchase with all the history it has on the privacy issues. Opportunities Internet users are increasing day by day and thispotential market is always open for the search engines. Due to the strong copyright and the brand name, Google is to the advantage of the other search engines in securing the new customers (Mbalectures, 2010, p. 3). A major competitor of Google being the social networking sites have been neutralized with the introduction of a social networking site for itself which is Google plus (Mbalectures, 2010, p. 3). This is also away to market Google to mostly the youth. Guyette (2007, p. 3) also identifies the more opportunities present to Google. In particular, wireless network expansions, expansion into the TV industry, development of new hardware, partnerships especially with Microsoft and agreements with governments are the key areas likely to increase the market share of Google. Threats Google Incorporation has also a number of threats hindering its actualization of total control of the market. The most obvious threat is the competition and especially the dislike from Microsoft (Guyette, 2007, p. 3). Other threats include the security of severs, continued insistence by countries to censor information, corrupt programs, privacy issues and public’s perception as identified by Guyette (2007, p. 3). When it comes to research and development, Google is way ahead of the competitors with its known traits of poaching the talented engineers from its competitors and possession of the Google sever that gives Google its search capabilities. Even with it being a powerhouse in market share and research, Pingdom (21010, p. 1), analysis the impact of the competitors and how Google handles them. Market programs and the marketing mix Google’s marketing plan is broken down into the 4-Ps of marketing namely, price, product, promotion, and place. These are the variables that are mixed to come up with a good business strategy that is competitive enough to earn the company a competitive advantage over the other companies in the search engine industry. Mindjet (2005, p. 1) indicates the need for keeping its scale of success even with the market having many competitors with the likes of yahoo which is an old search engine. Google’s announcement of IPO allows room for the analysis of every penny and cent of the company by the stockholders, thereby; more intensification to keep the competitors at bay should be enhanced (Mindjet, 2005, p. 1). The first element of the marketing mix is promotion. Promotion activities involve personal selling, advertisements and sales promotion. These tools communicate the success the product has achieved in the persuasion of the customers to buy or rather use their products. Google in many instances refused the advertisements of products or any banners being displayed in its homepage. The key purpose of Google has been acting as a search engine and avoiding some fancy graphics in the view that such graphics on the homepage affects the search results (Mindjet, 2005, p. 2). Surprisingly, advertisements of Google are done by the word of mouth. Brand name is used in many instances by people just as an ordinary name and people mostly refer to search as to ‘Google’. As Mindjet (2005, p. 2) indicates, the convenience of the search results and services made by Google has made the word ‘Google’ be among the best brands in the world. Google came up to be a search engine way later than other search engines like yahoo, but it took the industry by storm. Mindjet (2005, p. 2) explains the reliability of Google in that people like the search engine because it does not have a homepage with a lot of annoying banners and this gives the search engine speed to search. The simple and straight forward approach of Google has seen a liking emanating from the people, and this is the basis for the spread the ‘Google’ brand by its dedicated users. Google exhibits the success achieved from viral marketing and, therefore, saves on hefty budget bills of catering for market strategy planning (Mindjet, 2005, p. 2). Viral marketing takes advantage of the loyal customers to the company to advertise the company’s name through friends, who in turn tell their friends and the flow of information travels through the public. Mindjet (2005, p. 2) identifies Google as a good example of the ideology of viral marketing. The websites that Google produces are not advertised, and they depend on the public to advertise their products for them. An example is froogle as identified in Mindjet (2005, p. 2), Google did offer free services and backed it up this with public participation. Place is another very significant marketing strategy decision that should be considered to achieve competitive advantage. Place refers to the company’s or organization’s activities that make their products accessible to their customers. In this instance, Google’s place is the internet, and this is a thing Google does best (Mindjet, 2005, p.3). Eric Schmidt, C.E.O of Google, ascertains this by the number of searches that are made by Google increment from 100million searches to 200million and over in a day. Product as the other component of 4P’s of marketing can be regarded as the most significant. Product is regarded as anything that can be taken to the market for consumption, use or satisfaction. A product can either be tangible or intangible, that is, in the form of a service (Armstrong and Kotler, 2006, p. 278). Google offers quite a number of services to its customers, and they characterize their products into three distinct classes; 1) advertising solutions, 2) Google store and 3) business solutions. In the Google store, the sale of tangible things is done. Business solutions involve a search appliance incase of companies which are in need of solutions to their search problems. Lastly, the advertising solutions are text-based ads that customers of the sites click to view the information set by the Google customers. Every click by the users leads to a pay to Google for that service (Mindjet, 2005, p. 3). The last of the 4P’s is price. Price as stated by Armstrong & Kotler (2006, p. 353) is the amount of money that is a charge by to different customers as a benefit to the usage of different products or service. Google sets its prices with the consideration of discounts, list prices and allowances. Mindjet (2005, p. 4) clearly gives a disclaimer on setting of the prices since customers are highly interested in the product quality and its value. Objectives and issues Google has an objective of ensuring that people in the world have access to the internet. Google’ mission is to organize all the information in the world and avail to all. They have a long term serving the whole universe with information that is relevant and readily accessible in their daily practices (Kotler & Armstrong, 2010, p. 252). Companies, according to Kotler & Armstrong (2010, p. 256 & 257), should ensure that the corporate growth (that is profitability growth) and market share are achieved, and management of any business works if the goals and objective are met. This brings out the issues of good management and the market share potential of a firm. In US, google has a 67% market share (as at December 2012) and this shows that with proper market analysis the world, market share can get to over 70%. The brand name of the company is the other main focus of the organization. The brand name builds the reputation of the organization to the customers. This in turn brings about customer loyalty. The better the reputation the more it will be attractive to investors, employees, and customers (Kotler & Armstrong, 2010, p. 258). Market strategy Several reasons have led to the development of Google as a world leading search engine. Google has developed and gained successes in Gmail, Google maps, Google video and Google earth and won several awards due to these applications. Pingdom (2010, p. 3) identifies several reasons have led to it overcoming challenges from the competitors including Microsoft and yahoo The strategy for this success of the Google Inc starts from its homepage. This has led to the high number of users because it makes the search fast and reliable. With the other search engines having too many banners on their homepage, Google took this advantage and produced a fast and easy search box. These are all to do with psychology and the people’s way of thinking that lead to this massive success (Mindjet, 2005, p. 4). Quality of the results is another attribute that Google possesses and customers can entrust this site for the best results. Good advises given to the co-partners of Google have also really helped to its success e.g. the strategy of Larry Page stepping down to allow for one leader of Google that is Eric Schmidt (Guyette, 2007, p. 1). Google’s environment is always changing and, therefore, it has to adopt good strategies and systems to reduce the threats and counter competition. Acquisitions are another strategy that Google uses to counter its threats and competitors. So far, it has acquired more than 50 companies through mergers and through successful implementations, the companies have been assimilated in the Google culture (Goodwin, 2013, p. 2). Google’s financial budgets Google spends quite a lot of money in marketing its products. Similarly, marketing finances most of it budget due to the Ad Words where companies. The reasons for this huge spending on marketing are to ensure that a brand hits the market by a storm and any applications that are developed are adopted by the people and gets good limelight. Google is facing threats from social media sites and, therefore, advertising tries to improve its G+ application to counter that competition (Kelleher 2010, p. 2). In the year 2009, Google spent 1.8 million on sales and marketing as indicated in Kelleher (2010, p. 2). This shows the importance of marketing and its impact to achieve a certain market share. Conclusion and implementation Marketing needs a continuous cash flow and a team of marketers that are agile enough to position and secure customer loyalty. This builds on its reputation and improves the market share of the company. The shifts in the environment of the web and search industry and the changing dynamics should be taken into account in the marketing strategy implementation. References Hartline, D.M., Ferrell, C. O. 2010. Marketing Strategy. London: 2010 Cengage Learning Ltd. p. 19-23 Kotler, p. j. & armstrong, g. m., 2010. Market mix and market strategy. In: principles of marketing. s.l.:pearson education limited, pp. 250-258 (pingdom, 2010). Fifield, P., 2007. Marketing strategy, the difference between marketing and markets. Netherlands: Elsevier Ltd. p. 23 &24 Mindjet, 2005. Google's 4Ps of marketing: marketing mix introduction. castellar articles, pp. 1-4. Goodwin, D., 2013. google once again claims 67% search market share. big data solutions for SEO, 18 february, p. 1 & 2. Pingdom, 2010. Google's competition: most of the internet. Royal Pingdom, 5 march, p. 2 & 3. Mbalectures, 2010. SWOT analysis of google, london: mbalectures. p. 1-3 Guyette, P., 2007. Google Inc marketing study analysis, New Hampshire: RivierCollege. Kelleher, K., 2010. Google Spends a Bundle on Ads-But Why?. Gigaom, 17 april, p. 1 & 2. Read More