Comments on: Google brand and other moments of meaning manufacture

By: untyping

untyping — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 10:29:10 +0000

Authentic is the Authentic Black

It’s pretty rare that I agree with anything that Joel writes on his blog Joel on Software. However, when he discusses his site redesign he hits on something that rings true: A long time ago I paid a top web…

By: Steve Portigal

Steve Portigal — Sat, 03 Sep 2005 04:00:49 +0000

Here's an interesting piece in the Google/M$ wars - http://news.com.com/Court+docs+Ballmer+vowed+to+kill+Google/2100-1014_3-5846243.html - although it omits the part where Ballmer calls Schmidt a p***Y (can I say pussy on this blog?)

By: Steve Portigal

Steve Portigal — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 17:44:27 +0000

Here in Silicon Valley there is a Google/Yahoo tension. The digerati press and blogosphere was often doing bits about how Yahoo didn't get it anymore and Google did. About 3 or 4 months ago that shifted back with an article around the 10th anniversary of Yahoo pointing to things like the leadership at Yahoo being more focused on the actual user than at Google (and find any designer from Google and they'll tell you the same thing).

One can't avoid the regular postings from Yahoo HR trying to staff up in various design and user-centered capacities. They have enormous head count, they are growing rapaciously, all one's friends end up working at Yahoo, even in other parts of California. They are growing, they are Doing Things. It seems more real somehow than the latest thing from Google.

Many points buried in this rant, I guess, but the key one is that Google/Microsoft isn't the only cultural metric for goodness/innovativeness of the brand and product. There's a key Yahoo story here as well.

By: Ginger

Ginger — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 16:49:32 +0000

This new turn feels like a different phase of the natural arc that every trend, meme, major brand seems to go through: creation, fall, redemption. During the brand creation of Google, it felt like a personal secret that no one knew about except you and a select few. It was like a speakeasy, as Peter mentioned. Goodwill toward Google crested in the tech community months ago, when Google started to saturate every inch of public brainspace. Big media outlets are now picking up on that. We're all tired of hearing about Google. It has hit that point when a popular song becomes too familiar and no longer sounds good.

The interesting phase will be Google's redemption -- how they make (or don't make) it happen. How are they going to build a sustained personal relationship with each user that brings out the cheerleader in them again? How do you make millions of people feel special and important again?

By: IshMEL

IshMEL — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 16:03:15 +0000

Of course one of the signs that your brand has jumped the shark is when the Onion starts making fun of you: See "Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can't Index" [ http://www.theonion.com/content/node/40076/1 ]. I think part of what's happening is the Underdog Phenomenon. Remember when Amazon was the plucky startup trying to fight the behemoth of Barnes & Noble? Now Amazon is the behemoth. I think the same thing's happening with Google. (Incidentally, someone better get on the horn and tell them to put up a Katrina donation button on their home page, stat.)

By: Peter

Peter — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 06:53:15 +0000

Very interesting post, Grant (as usual). I wonder if part of the effect you detect is due to the manner in which most of us came to know of the Google search engine versus how we have come to know of later Google products.

Awareness of Google search engine was originally spread by wom (word-of-mouth), first among a group of people at Berkeley's Computer Science Dept (where it all began), and then to their friends and colleagues outwards from there. I believe this wom began before Google was a company, and so I think it was not an intentional marketing strategy of the Google founders. I've been a user of their search engine since 1998 or so, and I heard about it from an academic computer scientist. I think most longer-term Google search engine users would have first heard about it from someone they know.

I think this factor gives a certain flavour to the cultural meanings attached to the brand, which -- perhaps -- is absent from the meanings of the later Google products. I know that for their email service, they again tried to build market presence through wom (and exclusivity), but most of us would have first become aware of the product before that, through stories in the mass media or the business/IT media.

Your post raises interesting questions about how the meaning of a message can be coupled with the medium used for its transmission: The medium is defnitely a part of the message. (As a tangential note, so-called Information Theory -- due to Shannon, et al, and which allegedly underpins our present age -- has nothing to say on this topic *at all*, since it explicitly ignores the semantics of communications. It is a theory of autistic communication only.)