Practicalmadness

Those hard-hitting, curious investigative journalists at the Associated Press have noted that golly gee, for a company that makes almost all its money from advertising Google doesn’t seem to spend much of that money advertising itself.

The funny thing is, the AP story can’t really seem to explain how Google became such an industry player despite spending almost nothing on marketing over the past few years. They do try, but the quotes and explanations they find tend to sound good while explaining nothing:

Although Google regularly promotes its brand and services on its own online ad network, that soapbox hasn’t been the key to its ubiquity.

Instead, Google has relied on word-of-mouth and the media’s obsessive coverage of its every move to establish a prized brand just nine years after Page and Brin first set up shop in a Silicon Valley garage.

Okay, so “word-of-mouth” and “media obsession” — two things which, in consumer marketing terms, are virtually the same thing as “magic pixie dust.” Even word-of-mouth or (if you must) “viral” campaigns can be cultivated by a savvy marketer, and noting that a product or service is simply promoted via word-of-mouth isn’t news.

What the AP is trying to sound intelligent about here is how Google can become not just successful but ubiquitous with few or no media buys. And ironically they come closest to explaining it by citing an example of another company that’s managed to become ingrained in the American consumer landscape while spending almost nothing on traditional mass advertising:

Starbucks Corp. spent just $95 million on advertising last year, 49 percent less than Google did. Like Google, Starbucks made a name for itself by developing a distinctive product that quickly resonated with consumers whose enthusiasm became infectious.

Reporter Michael Liedtke wants to attribute Starbucks’s market dominance to some more of that “infectious enthusiasm” pixie dust, but I think the answer — both for them and for Google — is way simpler than that.

It’s a strategy you might call “designed ubiquity,” where you force your target market to engage with your product by going to where your target market lives. For Starbucks, that means opening more than 13,000 retail stores in locations with a lot of visibility for a large number of well-heeled consumers. On many a Chicago street corner, it’s easier to notice an actual Starbucks than it would be to notice an ad for a Starbucks.

And the placement of Starbucks locations corresponds to both the “Third Place” marketing philosophy and the migratory pattern of the ideal Starbucks customer. If you’re a well-heeled white person living in an affluent North Side neighborhood, you’re likely to pass at least one Starbucks on the way to and from work, and if you work in the Loop you’ll spend your day literally surrounded by them.

Starbucks locations aren’t really ubiquitous, though — they just seem that way in certain major cities. Most Chicago neighborhoods have no Starbucks stores at all, and most have just one or two locations. But they’re on every corner of the parts of the city where their most desired market (yuppies) lives and works, that’s enough to forcibly insert their brand into our national psyche, and the rest, indeed, is just word of mouth.

How does this relate to Google? Well, let me ask you something, Readers — how often do you go to google.com these days? I know we all end up there, and I’ll allow that many of you start there. But do you really type that URL (or click a bookmark of it) into your browser when you want to search for something?

Or do you just type your search query into a handy little box in the corner of your browser window?

Currently and since at least 2003, Google has been the default search engine in both Firefox and Safari. (I won’t even mention the Google Toolbar for IE and Firefox, which has been around even longer.)

As with Starbucks’s targeted ubiquity, being the default search provider for those browsers puts the Google search product at the fingertips of only the roughly 20% of the market who use them. But that’s a valuable 20%. Firefox users are more likely to be savvy, experienced users who other people turn to for advice or recommendations. And until this year, Safari was a Mac-only product that had the benefit of being the only factory-installed browser on any new Apple computer, and Mac users likewise tend to be folks other people listen to when it comes to technology.

My point here is that these placements didn’t simply come out of the clear blue sky. Google made deals with Mozilla and Apple to become their default search provider, allowing them to place themselves directly onto their most valuable target market’s browser windows, inserting themselves effectively into the zeitgeist without the expense and uncertainty of a big media buy.

The AP may be right that traditional advertising is becoming less and less relevant to the success of a company or product. But the alternative isn’t magic pixie dust. It’s a very simple and very humane: Google and Starbucks created compelling products, then found ways to challenge people to interact with their product in a way that — oh my god — was useful in its own right. For Starbucks, it was the convenience of being able to walk to the corner for a latté in less time than it took to hit the break room at your office. For Google, it was removing the added step of visiting their site to initiate a search.

Advertising is begging users who may have no desire or need for your product to come to you and ask for it. The secret to these companies’ success was to identify the customers they needed to reach and then to go after them aggressively while still finding a way to bring some value to the party.

Maybe that’s why Google’s marketing model is so hard for other companies and the media to figure out — they’re way too busy to beg.