One thing you know when Google launches a new application is that there is something very exciting in store. Something is going to change in this world. There is going to be a newer and better way of doing things. Their brand has got so much of the words “refreshing change” attached to it all over, making it really special. However, it isn’t just a joke to come up with such a power brand. It requires a systematic well planned out strategy. Here is what I think went right for them strategically.
The first thing that Google did absolutely right was get the product perfectly right. Internet is huge. Search Engines were there even before Google. But Google through its superior technology was one step ahead of competition each time. This is how they managed to enter the internet, making some space out of nowhere, and opening up a completely new dimension to the world of Internet.

Everything else that they did had a clear business sense in it – be it the price (or the lack of it), promotion, or the packaging.

After Google search had come into the market, and become quite popular, it was time to release their new feature – Gmail. Did they just release it one fine morning open to everyone? No they did not. (Though their product was that good it would have anyway taken over the market in no time).

What they used was the principle of Referral marketing. Now, almost everything that is online is free – that’s what works well for online stuff. However, when everything is free, some other launch strategy is needed to excite people. Otherwise, switching efforts are too high especially in an application like email. Google made themselves pricey with their new product Gmail. They did give out descriptions of how Gmail would work, on the Gmail site, explaining how Gmail was going to have the biggest email capacity across competition, how they would make money out of it, and how they had this new concept of “Mail as a Conversation”. However, not everyone got it just like that. You actually needed someone who already had an account to refer you to get an account of Gmail. And did that create a buzz or what! Personally, I wanted to register soon and check out the new services that it offered – such an innovator in the field of internet search would definitely have something big to offer.

The other aspect of referral marketing was focused on the referrer. Getting hold of these invites to refer someone else to Gmail was not automatic. Once you got a Gmail account, it took time to get hold of these invites. At times it took one day, at other times, 1 week, for the account holders to “win” invites. What was the fastest way to get them? No one really new, but those who did try and think, assumed that it must have something to do with sending more mails. So lots of them started shooting mails all around the place saying this was their new IDs. More often than not, with a decent rate of initial conversations, people got these invites. Having a Gmail invite was indeed quite a big thing when Gmail was launched!

An important thing to note here is that Gmail’s marketing strategy was to bring in a difference in the way things were normally done on the internet. Another important thing is, that Google could afford to do this because their product was worth that. Not every product can demand such a high return form of marketing.

Just like Google is now literally a word in the dictionary (“Please Google for the information you need” is what we say now!) Gmail became an asset for everyone who took it up. And now what they do is bring in incremental changes. They touch their core product only after rigorous testing, but everything else around it is built fast. And that’s because everyone in the world is different. So how you package your product ultimately should be based on who is using it. How they do that is with Google Labs – where they bring out new features regularly. You can choose to pick what you want from them and have them accordingly. And they also conveniently call these features “Labs”, which ensures that in case of any error, they can use the word “Beta” (also known as test release). Of course, there is rarely an opportunity that they give out for catching them with errors (and as we talk about this, we recently had the Google Search error and Google Mail Spam error )

Finally, another way they are promoting Google is offline – with their recently started bus service, which is going to span a month in which they will travel all over Tamil Nadu educating people – not only about internet, but about everything associated with it. They are also going to launch a TV ad for Google Chrome here and here.

What’s latest in Google? It’s Google Squared. It’s coming up soon. It is like a search engine that returns results in a tabular format. For example, if you type “cheap cameras”, it would return a list of cameras, with various other data in a table – like price, brand, pixel size, etc. Some other recent products of Google are Google News Timeline and Google Similar Images.

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