The Google Brand Strategy
The brand market is so much broader than the usual way of creating a logo and advertising with it. Successful branding is establishing yourself; your personality across a myriad of outlets and always staying one step ahead of competitors. To effectively enhance your brand, there are tools necessary to implement strategies for the sustainable growth of a company. In this article, you’ll learn all you need to know about the Google brand strategy, specifically, as it is one of the fastest-growing brands in the world amidst rivals and how much of the market they have taken charge of.
A brand encapsulates everything about a company, from its culture, segmentation, and sales strategy, to its market position, and for a company like Google to fully actualize its goals and satisfy its teeming audience, it needed to create an approach to outline and develop its objectives including their brand personality.
Read More: Google brand strategy: How Google dominates Markets.
How Google Dominates the Market
Have you wondered why Google is the leading search engine on the globe? Google doesn’t lead search engine market shares, it dominates. Oh yes!
Google is known for its exploitation of brand and market position amongst its competitors. With its uniqueness in offering qualitative and satisfactory search results, it is able to evoke customer dreams and aspirations.
Factually, it (Google) is surrounded by several other search engines like Bing, Yahoo!, Baidu, Wikipedia, etc, yet their market share doesn’t in any way compare to it.
Statistically, Google has maintained a high-end market share over the years, since its inception, resulting in an increase in the revenues generated through advertising. You may ask, is advertising an important factor in brand strategy and marketing? Owning a brand without advertising is like buying a car with no wheels. It is vacuous. Advertising is one way Google has been able to dominate its market, hence its speedy expansion in services, productivity, and other ventures. It seems to be a cinch when it comes to advertising your brand, but I tell you in all honesty that brand advertising is not an easy-peasy task and so building a strong backup of strategies gives you an edge over your competitors. This is the understanding Google have which undoubtedly has helped them to dominate the market.
Read More: Easy market development strategy in 2023 (+ quick guide)
How The Google Brand Strategy Works.
The Google brand strategy works at the snap of the fingers. Moreover, it is pretty simple and seemingly harmless. The more time we spend surfing the internet, clicking on ads, and performing a variety of searches and downloads, the more revenue is generated from these activities. All they need to do is improve internet access and speed and search result accuracy which other search engines lack.
Therefore, in order to develop a brand strategy, it is ideal to carry out your market research using the four basic strategies as a yardstick, which include:
- The position.
- Name development.
- Sponsorship.
- Development.
With these, you will see your brand dominating the market and being a pacesetter.
A Significant Improvement
The name, brand, and logo of Google have always been synonymous with a simple blue, red, yellow, and green serif typeface. Over the years, Google has tweaked its iconic multi-colored logo. Mostly changes to the shadow effects, the Google logo has stayed consistent over the last decade.
Google received its most significant rebranding on September 1, 2015. While the new brand identity is still a typeface-style logo, it has ditched the conventional serif in favor of a bolder, cleaner, and more dominant look. Salute to sans-serif typefaces!
However, it’s still simple and average by design standards, according to branding experts.
What Makes Google an Exceptional Brand?
For the purpose of argument, disregard the possibility that Google’s logo is what distinguishes them. So, what exactly is it? Why do they consistently top ‘best of’ lists around the world?
My brand training and expertise as a Certified Brand Strategist (CBS) at The Brand Establishment leads me to the purpose, or why the firm exists (rarely do I start with the logo – the logo is the culmination of the reason and proven points of differentiation). In the case of Google, their goal is quite obvious (as stated on their website):
“Google’s aim is to organize the world’s knowledge and make it widely accessible and valuable,” says the company’s website.
Google’s aim is succinct and ambitious, and it sets the tone for a serious and difficult undertaking.
#1. Their People
Employees at Google, like those at other world-class organizations, are empowered. To be sure, Google employees feel they are positively improving the world and are working really hard and passionately to achieve this goal. “It’s actually the people that make Google the kind of company it is,” Google claims on its website.
#2. Their Quality
Google’s goods are fantastic. When you utilize the search engine, Google Maps, Gmail, or Google Analytics, you can be confident that everything will go well. Google believes that it is ideal to focus on one subject and do it really well. This is great to hear, especially at a time when businesses are increasingly becoming “me too” and “all things to all people.” Google began by focusing on doing a great job with search, and then leveraged that expertise and innovation when they moved into new products.
#3. Their (good) Innovation
Innovation for innovation’s sake is futile. Innovation with a specific purpose is valuable, if not essential for a company. Think about it, Google began in 1998 as a search engine. That’s it. No different than Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, or WebCrawler.
Google now powers smartphones (Android), has perhaps the greatest web browser (Chrome), explores every part of the globe for Google Maps and Google Earth, and operates the world’s largest and most successful video service (YouTube), among other things. While the company has evolved throughout time, the purpose has remained the same: to create creative products.
How Can Other Companies Achieve Google-Like Success?
To begin, schedule an introductory appointment with a Certified Brand Strategist. Apart from being a bright and creative lot, we approach a company and brand development in a unique way. We communicate in a language that is distinct from that of a traditional marketing or brand shop, and it is a language that is heard loud and clear in the C-suite.
As brand strategists, our goal is to get businesses to think beyond their logo and focus on improving company culture and customer experience. After all, a logo isn’t the only thing that distinguishes one organization from another. People do not prefer Starbucks to Dunkin’ Donuts because they prefer the latter’s emblem. They prefer Starbucks because of the welcoming ambiance, friendly service, and high-quality items.
The Dirty Secret of Brand Development
A high-quality logo is crucial because it is frequently a company’s initial impression. But here’s a dirty little secret about brand development: your logo has very little to do with the value of your brand.
The flashy font, progressive color palette, and whirly-gigs of a logo, mark, bug, or icon (whatever you want to call it) are fun to create and dissect, but they’re unimportant in terms of brand development and value.
While a memorable logo can help with brand recall, brand development has always been and will continue to be an internal activity that focuses on workers, culture, processes, efficiency, best practices, and other factors. A favorable interaction with a professional and friendly store clerk has a considerably greater impact on brand value than a neat-looking item incorporating colors.
FAQs
What is Google's brand position?
Google sees its mission as making a positive impact on people’s lives by organizing the world’s information and making it easily accessible. Not everyone remembers today that in the past Google was reluctant to promote its brand and rarely advertised.
What are the 4 branding strategies?
The four brand strategies are line extension, brand extension, new brand strategy, and flanker/fight brand strategy.
Why is Google a leading brand?
Google tops the list of most valuable media brands with US$191.2 bn brand value. As a search engine, most of Google’s revenue is derived from advertising, leading to its inclusion as a media brand and the extension of the Brand Finance Media ranking to include 50 brands this year.
What does Google brand mean?
Companies know they’ve got it made when their brand is turned into a verb. Google meant search: Google’s own dictionary application defines “Google” as a verb meaning “to search.” (The folks at Merriam-Webster concurred.)