Introduction
The term “marketing mix” became popularized after Neil H. Borden published his 1964 article, The Concept of the Marketing Mix. Borden began using the term in his teaching in the late 1940s after James Culliton had described the marketing manager as a “mixer of ingredients”. E. Jerome McCarthy later grouped these ingredients into the four categories that today are known as the 4 Ps of marketing.
Marketing decisions generally fall into the following four controllable categories: Product, Price, Place (distribution) and Promotion. These four P’s are the parameters that the marketing manager can control, subject to the internal and external constraints of the marketing environment. The goal is to make decisions that center the four P’s on the customers in the target market in order to create perceived value and generate a positive response.
Broadly defined, optimizing the marketing mix is the primary responsibility of marketing. By offering the product with the right combination of the four Ps marketers can improve their results and marketing effectiveness. Making small changes in the marketing mix is typically considered to be a tactical change. Making large changes in any of the four Ps can be considered strategic. For example, a large change in the price, say from $19.00 to $39.00 would be considered a strategic change in the position of the product. However, a change of $131 to $130.99 would be considered a tactical change, potentially related to a promotional offer.
The term “Marketing Mix” however, does not imply that the 4P elements represent options. They are not trade-offs but are fundamental marketing issues that always need to be addressed. They are the fundamental actions that marketing requires whether determined explicitly or by default.
Google’s Marketing Mix
Google was founded by two Stanford University students, at their dorm room, in 1995. Google has become the world’s most popular search engine since then and can attribute its success to an innovative marketing plan. The culture of Google is similar to many of the dotcoms of the 90’s. Most employee workstations are surrounded by leisure activities such as rollerblading, coffee lounges and an array of toys, such as scooters and rubber balls, strewn throughout the building.
The culture was built to suit the habits of a generation of computer nerds who were tired of sitting in cubicles. Google is unique in where the employees really had helped develop a tool that was needed by everyone who had an internet connection. It found a good market niche and followed the path of innovation to market itself as the strong company that everyone knows today.
Google’s marketing plan can be broken down into the four P’s of marketing; product, price, promotion and place. Google has taken into consideration each one of these areas of marketing and used them as an advantage over their competitors.
Product
Google offers services as a form of it product to its customers. The products they offer falls into industrial products; Google’s’ business products offer services to their customers such as advertising and providing their search technology to solve companies’ search problems within their intranet. Also, they also sell tangible items along with its service or hybrid offers and also sell “pure” products.
Google categorizes their products into three classes: Advertising solutions, Business Solutions, and the Google Store. In their Advertising solutions, they offer Google’s AdWords. 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 the customers to set up their site as the volume of visitors to the customer site’s increases.
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. Discounts are another element of price setting.
The three types of discounts are quantity, trade, and cash. Quantity discounts are offered to consumers for buying in bulks or in large quantities. Google at the moment is not providing its customers with discounts nor allowances in its Google AdWords program
Last but not least, the credit terms required by an organization to finalize the product price. Google’s structure tightly relates payment periods with credit terms, yet each organizations credit terms vary depending on the type of industry. As mentioned earlier, Google provides a monthly credit limit for those customers with the good financial record. The credit limit starts at $50.00 a month and it can increase to more than $500.00 a month.
Promotion
Google relies greatly on word of mouth to develop and expand their innovative brand. The more credible a brand is, the more widely its reputation will spread. Google, like Kleenex and Xerox, has become so pervasive that the brand name is used as an ordinary word. Google’s convenient service and precise search results have made it one of the world’s best-known brands and search engines almost completely through word of mouth from satisfied users.
Google’s outstanding results it has compelled its dedicated users 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. With viral marketing, customers become the company’s advertisers by telling their friends who in turn pass on the news to their friends until it gets out of hand and word of mouth results. Google is definitely a successful word of mouth and a word of mouth circulates based on the quality of the product.
Their best reference is a friend and with enough friends, they will create a buzz and significant exposure by word of mouth, the ultimate branding technique. Word of mouth centered on quality, not publicizing, prevails in the new business environment.
Place
Google’s place is the internet. When it comes to Google and trying to target their consumers, the people on the Internet, no one does it better. Google is one of about four search engines that have significant results. Google and Alltheweb do the best crawling. Google has been selling out only recently, and still shows some “pure search” residue from its early roots.
Just as Microsoft was late to recognize the importance of the Internet, they are once again unprepared to take on Yahoo and Google. In 2003 Microsoft began experimenting with their own crawler at a very low level. Good search engines need many months of practice before they can crawl the web effectively, and order the results so that searchers perceive them to be relevant.
Conclusion
The thing that Google does so much better than the other search engines is they bring up the closest matching websites and are not biasing the search with any paid advertisements. They must continue to separate the paid search results with the organic search results.
Lastly, Google should continue to be innovative and try new things. They are constantly using technology and bright minds to come up with useful tools for everyday use. They also have a wide variety of services available to businesses that most overlook. To keep up with technology and push its boundaries in the web world, Google hires the best of the best. Many people say they can’t remember what life was like without Google and with its continued innovation, there will be many more people added to that list.
References
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