I was listening to an interview with Eric Schmidt on the Diane Rehm Show regarding his new book “How Google Works.” While I found the interview with him interesting apparently Eric Schmidt isn't quite aware of How Google Works (at least currently) even though he ran the company for 10 years. What does this mean?
Diane Rehm asked him about having to compete against Microsoft and this was part of how Schmidt replied to the question;
So, what we learned even early because of the power of the internet, if you have a new product idea, you don't need to worry so much about your brand, or your marketing, or your budgets, or your channels. You just have to build a product that's extraordinarily good and get customers quickly.
Google in the early days obviously didn't spend time marketing Google. People just started using the search engine, liked it, and told others about it. He continued his response:
And if you look today, a decade later, that's how the internet is working. Everyday you see people vying for your attention, some new service of some new product, and when they catch on they grow very fast.”
While I agree with his statements a certain extent, it's really not accurate. Google has a marketing department to promote it's newest and latest features and services to the public. More importantly, Google engages in a lot of of traditional advertising nowadays like running TV commercials for the Google App. Here is one I saw the other night while watching TV.
Google App Commercial – Bad Dog
http://youtu.be/mo9CqE629ms
So does Eric Schmidt want to explain to me how this isn't marketing and advertising? I'm pretty sure TV commercials are in fact advertising, or does he just not consider that marketing?
Being a journalist I hear this sort of speak and rhetoric a lot. Especially when a public relations or marketing company contacts me asking me to write about one of their client's with a “hot new app” or “innovative idea.” A lot of times they emphasis how the company has grown quickly via “word of mouth and social media” and they haven't marketed the company. This is of course ridiculous when you consider a public relations professional, a marketer, is contacting me. While this is annoying it is worse when it is blatant PR spam.
To a certain degree what he said is true. There are a lot of great services and companies that have grown extremely rapidly with little advertising. WordPress, the software this website runs on, is an open source project that grew rapidly and they Automattic (the company behind WordPress and it's services) did not do marketing. People just love using WordPress, myself included, and tell people about it.
Also getting a lot of customers, or users, quickly is a challenging task and easier said than done. Often times great ideas fail and never catch on and become a footnote in internet history.
Even if a product is successful with a lot of users sometimes companies choose to close the doors anyway. Google Reader is a good example and people loved using that as their RSS reader.
I've heard the marketing side of Google is somewhat at odds with the engineering side. This is clear since the ex-CEO views marketing as unimportant, which might be why he left. How Google Works nowadays is much different than it was 15 years ago. I don't think they really stick to the mantra they even 10 years ago “Don't be evil” when Adsense was first introduced. This is with the Shared Endorsements opt-out on GooglePlus.
I'd be curios and interested to hear from readers. Do you believe Google needs advertising or marketing? What effect do TV commercials they run above have on promoting the Google App? What effect has social media had on the effectiveness of search engine optimization? Does a product only have to be good to catch on?
