Three years ago the Silicon Valley Brand Forum had Doug Edwards, director of brand and communications at Google, on a panel for a forum at Cisco. Doug (who has since moved on from Google) explained that Google “does not really do branding.” He said that their brand was their culture, and employees were expected to live the core values, especially the well-known “do no evil” tenet.
It is not unusual in Silicon Valley to hear a company play down the importance of brand management when they have the hottest products in a relatively new market. Too many technology companies believe that innovation is their brand, and that will always be their differentiator.
Chris Taylor, in his blog on the Business 2.0 site, opines that we are seeing the beginning of the Google backlash. The market is finally maturing, and they are starting to face real challenges that could impact their status as the golden boy of the technology world. He cites several omens, including Congress’ upcoming hearings on the DoubleClick acquisition, which has already been held up for four months, and a German conglomerate that includes Bertelsmann and SAP, who just received a $166 million grant from the German government to develop a search engine. And, of course, the question of when YouTube is ever going to start making money for Google.
In the 80s and 90s, Tandem Computers did not care about branding because they were virtually alone in the fault tolerant computing space. They were able to charge a premium for huge servers that were 99.99999% reliable. As the market matured, HP started running ads that said, “Why pay a premium for 5 decimal points when you can get 4 decimal points for half the price?” Tandem servers quickly became a commodity, and they were no match for HP’s marketing muscle. Tandem is now the NonStop division of HP.
It will be interesting to see if Google shows signs of building a strong brand over the next few years, or if “do no evil” is enough of a brand attribute to create preference in a mature marketplace. Do you think Google has a strong brand in spite of itself? Are they consciously building a brand by living their core values?
Tags: Add new tag, brand, forum, Google, Silicon Valley
