Entries in "advertising"
Marketing 101 - Google Style
As I was reading the chapter in my Marketing book on identifying market segments and targets I couldn't help but wonder if companies like Google even care about marketing in the traditional sense. For one thing, I wonder if Google even has a marketing budget (Of course they do). Whether or not they have consciously done this, their products seem to market themselves. One needs to do nothing more than read the daily news to read about their latest product launch. The question is, can they keep this pattern now that outside investors have a stake in the operation? Not being a marketing historian, I couldn’t say if other companies experienced this same behavior or not. I imagine Ford experience similar effects upon introducing the Model T in 1908. Ford now has a marketing budget of around $1 billion. It will be interesting to see how large (revenue) Google can become without traditional marketing programs. This raises another question, is the face of marketing changing right beneath our eyes? As more of us move away from traditional media sources to online media, perhaps Google’s marketing model will become the norm. Even AOL recently announced they will offer the content they traditionally offered to paying subscribers to all. Maybe they will finally stop sending those ridiculous CD’s in the mail.
My prediction is that Google’s marketing model will fail. Actually, I do not even understand how they make any money at all. I know I have never clicked on a “Sponsored Link”. I would like to think that as we become smarter consumers, the idea of being drawn to a company via advertising will decline. However, I have also never purchased anything from an Infomercial (not that there’s anything wrong with that). I guess my point is that although I would like to see the online media world void of advertising that is the reason why so much of it is free. So who is paying for all of this great content if we are that much smarter as consumers? I suppose it is the same people buying items from Infomercials, flyers, cold-calls, etc. Perhaps the online population is actually getting less intelligent as consumers as more of us join in. If nothing else, the changing face of marketing should prove interesting over time.