Business Case Study Analysis - Google

This essay highlights the challenges and opportunities for the growth and expansion of Google as a company, such as through the introduction of social media networking pages, bringing emerging markets of the developing world online and improving its mobile search services.

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1BUSINESS CASE STUDY ANALYSIS - GOOGLE
Introduction
Google is one of the largest multinational corporations in the world that is based in
America. It specializes in the provision of technology and internet based products as well as
services. While Google as a technological corporation has been steadily growing since its
inception in 1998, it has faced and continues to face a number of challenges to its growth
such as the challenge of competing with social media platforms, recruiting more and more
human resource for its artificial intelligence related activities and in the domain of mobile
search engines (Tran 2017). This essay highlights these challenges and also points to the
opportunities that lie out there for the growth and expansion of Google as a company, such as
through the introduction of social media networking pages, bringing emerging markets of the
developing world online and improving its mobile search services.
Background
Google: Some Relevant Facts
Google LLC is a multinational technology company which specializes in internet
related services and products such as cloud computing, search engine, online advertising
technologies, hardware and software (Garvin 2013). It was established in the year 1998 by
Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
Google as a company has been growing rapidly ever since its incorporation,
triggering in the process an entire chain of partnerships, acquisitions and products beyond its
core search engine, popularly known as Google Search. Google also offers services that are
designed for productivity and work, time management, scheduling, email, social networking,
cloud storage, video chat and instant messaging, language translation, video sharing and

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mapping and navigation (google.ca 2018). It also offers products that can be used for photo
organizing, note taking and photo editing.
The major competitors of Google within the marketplace are Yahoo, AOL in terms of
search engines used for gathering relevant information and data from the internet. In terms of
database management and social media giants, Google has competed with Oracle, PTC, Intel
and Facebook respectively (Perrin 2015).
The digital excellence is enhanced and the ecommerce exports are managed well,
which enables the company to expect higher revenue generation. The management of
customers globally and focusing on the localization factor. The global digital expansion is
possible not only based on the relevant sector, but also according to the ways clients are made
aware both locally and globally (Russell, Stuart and Norvig 2016). The cloud advertising is
another effective way for creating market growth opportunities and expand customer base.
The social media platforms use could enhance the awareness of products among the
customers and allow the company to gain relevant market growth opportunities to attract
more customers from the social networking websites (Garvin 2013).
The strength of Google, i.e., most of the revenue coming from advertising, has been
the major weakness of the organization. Due t the fluctuating demands of the advertisements,
th revenue generation may get affected too. The high rate of turnover among the employees is
another major weaknesses affecting market growth for Google (google.ca 2018). The useof
social media platforms can be a major challenge due to its widespread marketing activities
like enhancing awareness of the products and services of Google.
Because of the most of the revenue coming from advertisements managed through
search engines and AdSense program, the business model that has influenced management of
commercial search engine is advertising. The search engine use has helped in managing the

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proper business models and fostered innovation of product and services (Iansiti, Marco and
Lakhani 2014).
Between 2010 and 2015, Google has become increasingly involved in the production
of hardware. It entered into a partnership with a number of well known electronics
manufacturers in order to produce its Nexus devices. Google, is today, one of the most visited
websites in the whole world, and was regarded as the most valuable brand in the international
market in the year 2017 (Tran 2017).
Important Issues Faced by Google Today
There are a number of risks and challenges that Google is likely to face over the next
ten years.
 The Social Media Challenge – The mobile advertising involves use of social media
and here Google has faced challenges while presenting ads on mobile rather than
placing ads with the use of desktop. The clicking on advertisements have slowed
down and the price required to present those ads is decreasing. There has been decline
in click volume for the company whereas the estimation of social media rate of return
on investments is complex too (Trainor et al. 2014). The social media ROI is based on
the business objectives and can differ according to the business approaches
undertaken, which makes the estimation a daunting task for Google to understand the
feasibility. While using social media platforms for creating an online presence,
Google aimed at creating brand awareness among the customers, but there was lack of
credibility of information sources along with lack of exchange of right information
among the employees. There are many social media platforms and one of the major
challenges faced by the company is to choose the right social media platform for
usage (Tiago et al. 2014). The social media challenges could also arise due to lack of

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proper content, which the clients should be habituated with; otherwise the business
might not be successful as Facebook or other social networking websites.
 Vertical Search – Google is a popular choice for people looking to search up
information on the internet. Big companies are known to spend hundreds and at times,
even billions of dollars on the sponsored links that usually run alongside the search
results in order to ensure they are getting web traffic. When it comes to the mobile
world however, things are very different. Smartphone users avoid making use of
Google in order to search for information. Instead they use apps for the same. Google
stands in the midst of mobile phone computing with popular apps such as Gmail,
Youtube and Maps and Android. It is not in control of the whole discovery experience
as such (Sirdeshmukh et al. 2018).
 The Artificial Intelligence Race – It was recently declared by Sundar Pichai, the
chief executive of Google that artificial intelligence which is fuelled by very powerful
computers are more important to humanity when compared to electricity or fire. Due
to this company has committed to employing plenty of human checkers to catch rogue
Russian bots, Youtube posers and unsavory content purveyors online (Garvin 2013).
It is also on the lookout for more workspace to accommodate its ever increasing
workforce in the Silicon Valley area. This in turn weighs down massively on the
company’s finances and logistics overall (Russell and Norwig 2016).
Key Opportunities for Google Today
Some of the key opportunities for the growth and expansion of Google as a company are as
follows –
 Bringing Emerging Markets Onto the Internet for Growing Business
Opportunities – Google has been taking part in discussions with a number of

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emerging markets in Africa and in Southeast Asia for setting up large scale wireless
infrastructure and networks in the towns and cities. If this happens there will be plenty
of opportunity for Google to set up services and apps (Iansiti and Lakhani 2014).
 Improve Mobile Surface – Google can focus on developing friendly mobile user
interface apps to compete with other apps that are much in use among smart-phone
users today. It can develop mobile friendly search engines too and improve on its
android services to get more and more people to turn to Google when searching for
information through their mobiles (Perrin 2015).
 Develop Social Media Platform – Google can beyond the provision of basic services
like email and video chat to creating actual networking pages or platforms along the
likes of Twitter and Facebook to compete with these and other social media platforms
and get more and more views from users around the world. With the development of
social media platforms, there has been increased brand awareness while there are
other search engine optimization benefits achieved by Google (google.ca 2018). The
social media platforms are developed to bring in more traffic through increased high
quality inbound links. The Google+ serves as a social layer for the company to
present its business and drive organic traffic for keeping the clients aware of the latest
updates, reviews and feedbacks provided the customers along with more followers of
the social networking website managed by the organization (Padilla-Meléndez,
Antonio and del Águila-Obra 2013). With the increased traffic, there will be
generation of leads and the sales can improve consistently with time.

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References
Garvin, David A. "How Google sold its engineers on management." Harvard Business
Review 91, no. 12 (2013)
google.ca. 2018. Google.Ca. https://www.google.ca/.
Iansiti, Marco, and Karim R. Lakhani. "Digital ubiquity: How connections, sensors, and data
are revolutionizing business." (2014).
Padilla-Meléndez, Antonio, and Ana Rosa del Águila-Obra. "Web and social media usage by
museums: Online value creation." International Journal of Information Management 33, no.
5 (2013): 892-898.
Perrin, Andrew. "Social media usage." Pew research center(2015): 52-68
Russell, Stuart J., and Peter Norvig. Artificial intelligence: a modern approach. Malaysia;
Pearson Education Limited (2016).
Sirdeshmukh, Deepak, Norita B. Ahmad, M. Sajid Khan, and Nicholas J. Ashill. "Drivers of
user loyalty intention and commitment to a search engine: An exploratory study." Journal of
Retailing and Consumer Services 44 (2018): 71-81
Tiago, Maria Teresa Pinheiro Melo Borges, and José Manuel Cristóvão Veríssimo. "Digital
marketing and social media: Why bother?." Business Horizons 57, no. 6 (2014): 703-708.
Trainor, Kevin J., James Mick Andzulis, Adam Rapp, and Raj Agnihotri. "Social media
technology usage and customer relationship performance: A capabilities-based examination
of social CRM." Journal of Business Research 67, no. 6 (2014): 1201-1208.
Tran, Sang Kim. "GOOGLE: a reflection of culture, leader, and management." International
Journal of Corporate Social Responsibility 2, no. 1 (2017): 10.

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