Google LLC: Products, Services, And Marketing Strategies

Organizational Products and Services

Discuss about the Dynamic Capabilities on Operational Marketing.

Google LLC is a multinational corporation mainly engaged in rendering internet-based services across the globe. Company will soon complete its 20 years as rendering these types of services. Its primary activities are linked with the business to business sector and in this sector; Google provides number of services to businesses and to the consumers also. Google Maps, Google mobile services, Google Pay, Google cloud services, dashboard, finance, Gmail, etc. All these services are availed by number of business entities and consumers which ease the operations of the organization. Google is rendering various services to the business enterprises so that they could easily attain their set goals and objectives. Collection of data and sampling them as per the requirements of various business enterprises, Google is helping its clients. Company renders its services to all types of companies irrespective of their nature (Britannica, 2018).

This report will cover organizational products and services which are rendered in the market and on the basis of this; appropriate marketing activities adopted by organization will be discussed to overcome with the challenges faced by the organization. Further, the report will discuss the marketing activities through which they could easily differentiate their services with the business to consumer sector. Second phase of the report will discuss organization’s marketing environment with the help of Porter’s five forces and PESTLE framework to analyse internal and external marketing conditions. The last phase of the report will include recommendations to improve the current marketing mix to enhance the effectiveness of organizational services along with identification of organizational strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats so that appropriate recommendations could be provided to support organizational marketing strategy.

Google LLC is an American multinational technology company that is specialised in internet-related services and products and it also includes online advertising technologies, software, hardware, search engine and cloud computing. The company was founded in 1998 and since then, it has established its effective presence in the global market. When Google entered into internet-based services such as search engine, few companies such as Yahoo and MSN were ruling the whole industry. Google took it as a challenge and with its huge product and service offering, it has made its effective position in the global market along with gaining leading position later on in the global market. Company’s growth triggered with chain of products like Google Search engine, Google Docs, Sheets, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, etc. An initial public offering took place in 2014 and then Google moved towards new headquarter in Mountain View, California and it is known as Googleplex. In 2015, Google’s services was reorganised as conglomerate known as Alphabet Inc. Google is the leading subsidiary of Alphabet and it continues to be the umbrella company for Alphabet for rendering internet related services and Sundar Pichai was appointed as the new CEO of Google replacing Larry Page who became the CEO of Alphabet (Britannica, 2018).

Marketing Activities to Overcome Challenges Faced by the Organization

Organizational primary B2B services are web-based services such as search tools, advertising services, communication and publishing tools, development tools which includes security tools, map-related tools, operating system, mobile applications, etc. (B2B Marketing, 2018). Amongst these services, search engine is the core product of Google which receives over 3 billion search queries per day and along with this, Google provides regional search option. Google has numerous services and products for directly customers as well as for the business organizations. With regards to this, organization has adopted various marketing activities for the purpose of enhancing organizational performance in the market along with promoting their products and services in the target market. Following are the options available for Google in terms of marketing choices which could be used for promotion and advertisement:

• Social media
• Direct marketing
• Sales promotion
• Television
• Radio
• Bill boards
• Email marketing
• Sponsorship of events

These marketing channels are available in the market for the purpose of promoting products and services in both B2C as well as B2B market. Although, both markets are different from each other in terms of size, scope as well as on the basis of challenges which arises in both these sectors. With regards to this, it is necessary for the organization to choose appropriate marketing options wisely so that desired outcomes could be attained (Business News Daily, 2018). Thus, for B2B market, following marketing channels is being used by Google in order to approach the business enterprises so that competitive advantage could be attained along with eliminating the challenges which arise in the market:

• Direct marketing
• Sales promotion
• Third party advertisement platform
• Email marketing
• Sponsorship of business events

Apart from these platforms, there are numerous other options are also available in the target market through which organization could enhance its performance while dealing with the challenges in an appropriate manner (Kumar, 2015). Following are marketing challenges of B2B market which are quite different from the B2C market:

• Technology Integration: Role of technology is immense in terms of accomplishing organizational functionalities and it could enhance organizational performance and it could also become the major factor of organizational failure. Every organization has its own requirements, thus, Google is required to develop appropriate services as per their client’s requirements whereas services of B2C market is similar for every consumer (de Jong & van der Meer, 2017).
• Marketing and sales alignment: Choosing marketing channels is very difficult in B2B market because business entities’ interest have also been shifted towards internet based platforms but their platforms are quite different from the platforms used by consumers.
• Globalisation and content marketing: Globalisation is increasing rapidly in the international market and Google is one of the behemoth enterprises across the globe which renders its services to every type of Business Corporation in the world. In relation with this, Google requires to put huge efforts for the purpose of analysing market conditions so that its clients’ requirements could be fulfilled (Wilden & Gudergan, 2017).

These are some of the challenges faced by Google while rendering its services to the business enterprises and these challenges create difference between B2B and B2C markets.

Bargaining power of suppliers	Bargaining power of buyers	Threats of new entrants	Threats of substitutes	Industry rivalry
Google is not a global dominant player	Over 3 billion searches are regulated on Google and there are not big competitors are available thus, buyer’s power is bit low (Qureshi, Aziz & Mian, 2017).	More than 77% searches are being conducted through Google across the globe, thus, scope for new entrants is bit hard.	Lack of substitutes, thus, impact of this factor is also low.	Before Google, Yahoo and MSN were the favourite search engines but currently, Google is a dominant leader across the globe except in China (Beauchamp, et. al., 2015).

Political	Economic	Social	Technological	Legal	Environmental
Google promotes those companies who avails their services and this results in diluting the competition, thus, European Union is imposing heavy penalties so that Google could not function in an appropriate manner. Another crucial political barrier for Google is in Chinese market because Baidu is ruling Chinese market and there are huge restrictions for Google to enter there.	Economic stability in major markets and rapid growth in developing countries (Baalbaki & Malhotra, 2015).	Use of social media, search engines and other Google products such as Gmail has been increased rapidly.	Rising internet access in developing countries.	Regulations on intellectual property and online privacy.	In order to fulfil the responsibilities and duties towards society and environment, it is necessary to implement CSR policies and strategies (Oh, 2018).

·       Strong market position ·       Strong brand image ·       Huge product and service offering ·       Strong infrastructure cost	Weaknesses ·       Much dependent on advertisement revenues ·       Lack of product integration in comparison to the competitor’s products ·       Weak global reputation (Huang & Sarigöllü, 2014).
Opportunities ·       Rise in internet usage ·       Increasing demand of digital marketing and online sales promotion	Threats ·       Fluctuations in exchange rate ·       Huge expenses on lawsuit ·       Privacy issues ·       Intense competition

On the basis of organizational internal capabilities, weaknesses, opportunities and threats available in the market, it could be analysed that there is huge scope of improvement in organizational current marketing mix. Thus, following are recommendations for Google in order to improve their current marketing mix strategies:

Google has a huge product offering and amongst them, one of the trending and most effective services is Google Analytics which is a freemium web analytics services which tracks and reports website traffic. This service is rendered in B2B sector and through this service; business companies could attain positive outcomes as it provides refined data to the business entities through which the desired goals could be attained easily. In relation with this, it has been recommended to Google to enhance features of Google Analytics in order to uplift their performance (Fan, Lau & Zhao, 2015).

Marketing Activities to Differentiate Services From the Business to Consumer Sector

It has been recommended to the Google to adopt fair pricing strategy to reach out to every business entities irrelevance to their nature, scope and size. If Google Analytics services will be available at low cost, then number of companies will be able to avail the analytics services.

These services mainly featured with AdWords and these are rendered through internet and in order to enhance the reachability of these services, it is required for the organization to render these services through third party websites also.

In relevance with promotion of these services, organization could adopt the available channels of B2B sector. These channels will help the organization to promote its products and services in the target market through which the demand will be increased which ultimately will boost up the company’s revenues, profits and its goodwill in the international market.

Conclusion

From the aforesaid information, it can be concluded that Google is a vast internet based platform and with behemoth product and service offerings, company has acquired a huge market share in the global market in terms of search engine, mailing services, etc. However, there is intense competition in the internet industry; Google has developed its unique as well as distinctive position in the target market. With regards to this, organization has developed its effective presence in the global and in order to uplift their performance, appropriate recommendations have been given to the company in order to support marketing strategies of organization.

References

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Britannica. 2018. Google Inc. [online]. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Google-Inc. [25/07/2018].

Business News Daily. 2018. Google for Business: A Small Business Guide [online]. Available at: https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/6344-google-business-guide.html. [25/07/2018].

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Fan, S., Lau, R.Y. and Zhao, J.L., 2015. Demystifying big data analytics for business intelligence through the lens of marketing mix. Big Data Research, 2(1), pp.28-32.

Huang, R. and Sarigöllü, E., 2014. How brand awareness relates to market outcome, brand equity, and the marketing mix. In Fashion Branding and Consumer Behaviors (pp. 113-132). Springer, New York, NY.

Kumar, R., 2015. Impact of Promotional Activities, After Sale Services, Mileage and Resale Value on the Purchase Decision-A Consumer Behaviour Study in Automobile Industry. Journal of Commerce and Trade, 10(1), pp.86-95.

Oh, J., 2018. Artificial Intelligent Agent: 300,000 Patent-Thesis Analysis, Intelligent personal assistant, Game intelligent, Global Trend, Technical Strengths and Weaknesses of each country and company.

Qureshi, M.S., Aziz, N. and Mian, S.A., 2017. How marketing capabilities shape entrepreneurial firm’s performance? Evidence from new technology based firms in turkey. Journal of Global Entrepreneurship Research, 7(1), p.15.

Wilden, R. and Gudergan, S.P., 2015. The impact of dynamic capabilities on operational marketing and technological capabilities: investigating the role of environmental turbulence. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 43(2), pp.181-199.