A Better Google
Google’s brand architecture is a mess.
Here’s how to fix it.
Update: With the creation of Alphabet, Google Inc. seems to have taken this proposal to heart. Or, more plausibly, they came to the same conclusions on their own. Though several of my recommendations are now inapplicable, I’m leaving this story up as originally published. The only changes since the original publish date (April 25, 2015) have been spelling corrections, minor rewords, and the removal of an extraneous paragraph suggesting an ad campaign for Google search. . (August, 13 2015)
The most damning indictment of Google’s brand architecture comes from Google itself. They claim to do just one thing well. Search.
Despite their bold devotion to singularity, Google does many other things. Everything from payment systems to cloud storage. And if Google does just one thing well, then by definition every one of these non-search products is not done well.
What’s Google? Search. It will never mean anything else in the customer’s mind. This is the fundamental problem with Google’s brand
It’s best to do one thing really, really well.
We do search.
Successful companies often extend their product lines. “We’re a recognizable brand! That allows us to enter new markets. More sales!” But there's a catch. Line extension tends to weaken brands because it stretches an existing perception beyond its point of applicability.
Take Holiday Inn’s branding misstep when launching an upscale business hotel line in 1983. As shrewdly pointed out by Al Ries in The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, not one person ever stepped in a Holiday Inn lobby and said “This is nice, but do you have anything a little nicer?” Holiday Inn means budget hotel; it can’t simultaneously mean upscale hotel. Yet the line was initially named Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza. That name, if mapped directly to a customer’s perception, would translate to “Budget Hotel Upscale Hotel,” which is nonsensical. Now untethered from the Holiday Inn name, Crowne Plaza has grown beyond 100,000 rooms worldwide.
Extending the Google brand beyond search was noted as far back as the famous 2004 Founders’ IPO Letter:
Google connects people and information all around the world for free.
We are adding other powerful services such as Gmail.
Since then Google has continued to add “other powerful services” to enable more people to find more information, yet few of these services are perceived by customers to be related to search, the thing Google does best.
It’s no coincidence that the most widely recognized non-search Google Inc. products launched or acquired since 2004 have stand-alone identities. These include Gmail, Android, Chrome and YouTube. Google means search. It can’t simultaneously mean web browser. A separate web browser brand was needed.
But several dozen Google endorsed non-search products remain Fiber, Play, Plus, Drive, Wallet, and, until recently put down to rest, Glass to name a few. This doesn’t include relatively unknown products like Ventures, Loon, BrandLab, and the well-known but not yet publicly named self-driving car. Just as with Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza, these Google endorsed brand names translate nonsensically in the customer’s mind. Google Plus translates to Search Social Network. Google Play translates to Search App Store. They will never map to a customer’s mind correctly. The search perception is just too strong.
Google makes such world-changing products that it’s tempting to forgive their half-assed efforts at positioning them. I mean, they’re lifting up balloons to provide the world with reliable internet, is it really commendable of me to critique the brand name on the craft itself?
I think it is, because bad branding flies in the face of the first thing Google knows to be true:
Focus on the user and all else will follow.
Users file away products and services in their minds as brands. Providing users with clear direction for interpreting a product is a critical part of the user experience. Google claims to focus on the user above all else, but their indecipherable naming system says otherwise. It’s part of the user experience Google has sadly overlooked.
The good news for Google is that this can be fixed. Here’s how:
1. Differentiate Google from Google Inc.
Where does the search product end and the company begin? It’s not entirely clear. The search logo is the company logo. This is the fundamental barrier to Google Inc.’s ability to launch new widely recognized products. It has to be addressed before doing anything else.
Google Inc. seems to be aware of this tension and has begun using the all grey mark on non-search products.
Still, at this moment the Google company page proudly flies the search logo on its mast.
In hindsight, Larry and Sergey should’ve created a new parent company before launching new, non-search products. But now, with so much brand equity latent in the Google name, a name change is probably out of the question. Googlers would revolt.
If the name must stay the logo should not. Google Inc. needs its own graphic identity and guidelines for consistent application. Crucially, employees must know the difference between the two. This will not be an easy task because employees have the strongest affinity for Google in its entirety. To them the search logo is synonymous with the company is synonymous with the brand.
Take Laszlo Bock, SVP of People Operations at Google. In his book “Work Rules!” he betrays his belief that the company is the search logo. Referring to Google’s now legendary logo doodles he says:
“We even play with our brand, something most companies hold sacrosanct.”
For Laszlo, the logo is Google’s “fun” culture manifested. Proof positive that “you can be serious without a suit.” The search logo is the company logo and a representation of Google Inc. as a brand. But to a customer the Google doodle only informs their perception of search. A customer sees search; a Googler sees the entire enterprise. Which users are we focused on again?
A new Google graphic identity would be used primarily for employees, investors and the business units and divisions of the company that only exist for B2B or to advance very broad corporate objectives. Google Ventures is a good example of one such business unit. Google X would be another. Google, Inc. would recede into the background like P&G, Unilever and other big houses of brands.
This would also allow an opportunity for Google Inc. to affirm a new mission, one that was sustainable far into the future as Google Inc. expands further beyond information and into categories like consumer goods.
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful
Googlers believe in the mission. Strongly. It, along with transparency and voice, is central to the employee culture. The mission also encompasses a great deal of their pursuits because almost anything can be defined as information. But, really, is a self-driving car information? A customer would say no, it’s a car. A Chromebook makes info universally accessible and is a mission fit, but not according to the customer. To them it’s just a laptop. Again, Google can defend its architecture by saying Googlers understand it and that everything is just information, but this betrays a lack of caring about the end user and the way they process information.
What is Google Inc. and why does it exist? Ask most customers and they’ll say “search.” What would Google Inc. say? The two different perceptions need to be aligned.
2. Narrow the search portfolio and purge that which isn’t search.
Google’s best product, the one thing it does really, really well is still search.
Yet, as strong as the search brand is there are still brand architecture improvements to be made. There are far too many Google endorsed search products in today’s ecosystem for a customer to navigate.
Consolidate the search products, especially business tools and advertising.
It’s hard to tell the many different search related products apart. I’m fairly Google fluent and I don’t know what half of these products are:
Stepping back from the individual products, there are essentially three to five different search product categories. The main three are Search, Advertising, and Businesses. Developers and Webmasters are a potential fourth and fifth, though these extend well beyond search and for that reason should potentially be stand alone brands.
The Search category is in good shape. There’s not a separate logo for Google Images or Shopping or Flights. Just the Google logo and a search bar. This is the model other product lines should follow.
The advertising category is a mess. Are users supposed to discern the difference between AdWords, AdWords Express, AdSense and AdMob? What is an Adwords, anyway? It’s advertising on Google. Why make it more complex to the end user than it needs to be?
All advertising should role up under the descriptive term Advertising. Within that product category there are a number of advertising options available but these are not separate products. Google has started to implement this change with “Google Ads” but it still treats each product as its own sub-brand with its own identity.
Managing your business web presence is important. So is organizing info about your business. This is another category of product. Google Business.
The Google Business product category includes everything from place info, search visibility management, payment acceptance, tag management, top search queries, related keywords, competitors, mentions and reviews, tips for improving keyword relevance and more. These are all separate Google products today even though they all do the same thing: help businesses manage their web presence and visibility on Google.
Google gives search users one URL and search bar to search the entire universe, why on earth does it give business users twenty different products and URLs to do just one thing?
Developers and Webmaster Google search tools are useful today but their reach goes beyond search. Google may retain these with the search ecosystem but they should narrow the focus down to the ways the tools impact search. Remember, Google means search in the customer’s mind. Any product labeled Google better relate to search.
Crucially, the only products that should bear the Google name are those that relate to search. Anything else, like Google Payment, must become its own stand-alone brand because it doesn’t comport with a user’s perception of Google (e.g. Google Wallet = Search Wallet). Which brings us to the next step.
Remove the Google name from all non-search products.
This is going to hurt like hell but it has to be done. Google means search. It will never mean anything else. So any non-search product must not be named Google.
Google Plus. Rename it.
Google Drive. Rename it.
Google Play, Analytics, Domains, Calendar, Loon, Keep. Rename them all. They are all separate concepts, distinct from search.
A way for me to take notes and organize my thoughts has nothing to with search. I’m more likely to use Google Inc.’s note-taking product as a stand-alone product than I am when it’s named Google Keep. Just as I am more likely to use YouTube than I am Google Video.
Yes, all this information should be searchable within Google. Search Everything, including my notes, my apps, my social network, my Drive. One of the wonderful reasons to launch new products is to enhance search. A smart faucet doesn’t have to be named Google Faucet for me to search my water consumption on Google.
The silver lining in this grueling restructure is the chance to reevaluate each product’s fit in the company. It will be clarifying and thrilling. And the exercise may lead to significant product enhancements. Maybe Google was so obsessed with fitting products into their search ecosystem that it missed a chance to make those products even better. To brand build every aspect of a product must support the perception you want to create. Building a product to the perception rather than just creating useful features results in products that a customer recognizes, remembers, and files away.
Google has useful non-search products today. It needs to shed the Google name from them and move from useful to purposeful. That purpose being to capture different shares of the customer’s mind.
3. Ditch the ego and embrace being a house of brands.
Waze, a traffic and navigation app, is owned by Google. It’s very popular. It would absurd for Google to now rename it Google Traffic. Yet, if Google had developed this product instead of acquired it, what would it be named? Probably Google Traffic. Would it be as popular today? Probably not.
Branding is about doing one thing well and owning that concept in the mind. Most of Google Inc.’s products do one unique thing and thusly have to own a unique share of the mind to succeed. Slapping the Google name on all products prevents this mind share from happening because it lassos them all to search. Waze does traffic. Google does search. Different things. Different names.
To earn more mind share Google must embrace being a house of brands. That means having the temerity to launch new stand-alone identities when they develop products. Google has the engineering talent to build a Waze, what it lacks is the branding acumen to build a Waze.
In a house of brands each product has a stand alone identity. Customers don’t purchase based on loyalty to the parent, they do so because of their affinity for the the brand itself. For example, Unilever has a number of stand-alone desert products. You’d recognize many of them.
Did you know that earthy, non-GMO using Ben & Jerry’s is also a proud member of this family?
Don’t you think Unilever would sell less Ben & Jerry’s if they renamed it Unilever Ben & Jerry’s? Or if it was named Breyers Organic? The same exact product by any other name would not sell as well. The name matters.
Don’t you think fewer Stella Artios drinkers would drink Stella Artios if they knew it was part of the Budweiser family? Exact same beer. Different perception about it with a different name. The name matters.
Do you think the perception of Lexus would suffer if accurately labeled Toyota Lexus? Excluding the company name matters.
In all these examples the parent company is hidden from view. The customer files aways the product as a brand, and that brand is its own concept. The company is not the brand. The unique product perception is. Reflexively naming products after the company is not just bad branding, it’s ego branding.
The company is not the brand. Naming products after the company is ego branding.
Any non-search product that Google wants a user to have a perception of needs to have its own identity and that identity must be positioned, just as Toyota positions Lexus, AmBev positions Stella Artois, and Unilever positions Ben & Jerry’s.
To date Google has been ego branding, furthering its own name recognition while failing to advance a user’s understanding of the product. Time to stop.
Google should go so far to launch separate versions of search products. Flight search can exist within Google and as a separately named product, just was traffic search exists in Google and also as Waze (just as Google Video and YouTube exist simultaneously). This would help diversify revenue streams as more Google Inc. products were adopted under other names.
It will also propel product development. A Google Inc. research company as a stand alone brand could make heaps of money. The smartest people harnessing the world’s most powerful data engine to answer big questions. Sounds like a winner. Google Inc. profits and search gets better.
A house of brands can dream up fantastically new products because the perception is constrained to that product alone. It’s total freedom to invent new brands.
4. Avoid sub-brands and think long-term.
To manage a house of brands you need to invest in each brand to keep them alive or else make a deliberate effort to kill them before they outlive their usefulness and bleed red.
Google is constantly tinkering with products and making improvements, yet these tweaks threaten the established products themselves.
This manifested with the recent Gmail improvement. Instead of updating Gmail and risk offending the existing user base, Google timidly launched a Gmail sub-brand: Inbox.
What is the long term purpose of this product? To replace Gmail? To give Gmail users another option for email management? In 5 years will there be Inbox and Gmail, side-by-side? I’m not quite sure.
A separate identity signals to the user that this is a unique product. Is Inbox different from Gmail? No, they are both Gmail. So why not just make this a Gmail setting?
Extending brand lines like this risks gutting the existing brand. Google should avoid it at all costs. Products can get better but launching a brand means a deliberate attempt to capture new mind share. Inbox is not capturing a new share of a user’s mind, it is needlessly competing with the Gmail share.
Google Inc. needs to strengthen the brands they manage or launch brand new ones. What they shouldn’t do is take the path of least resistance and extend what they already have. Long term it will hurt more than it helps.
Are the new identities Google creates today part of a long-term brand architecture plan? Branding is not all about launching great new features, it’s about looking into the future and knowing where your products will sit in the user’s mind. For a house of brands stacking products on top of each other is not a good place to be.
It’s best to do one thing really, really well.
We do _____________.
Google Inc. is changing the world. They make awesome stuff and are an awesome place to work, which leads to more awesome stuff being created.
They make such awesome stuff that their branding errors haven’t hurt them. In fact, it’s staggering to think that a company can proudly declare to the world that they only do one thing very well, and still get people to adopt the many products that aren’t that thing.
But by being bad branders they’ve probably left a lot of users and money on the table. Each product in their portfolio has potential to be its own strong brand, but that potential will only be realized with a commitment to effective brand management. Potential is maximized when each product is recognized for the one thing it does well.
Branding is the discipline of telling users exactly what a product is and how to perceive it. It is the epitome of focusing on the user, which is the first thing of the 10 things Google Inc. knows to be true.
Time to start acting like it by branding better.
