Google Inc.: Key Business Initiatives and Strategic Analysis Report

This report presents a case study of Google Inc., analyzing its key business initiatives in response to market challenges such as slow revenue growth and increased competition. The report identifies Google's strategic initiatives, including collaborations for disaster prediction, support for small businesses, and investments in renewable energy and electric vehicles. It examines customer insights, such as consumer preference for mobile shopping and conversational search, product insights focusing on product likability and repurchase probability, and operational insights related to employee benefits and operational efficiency. The report also details data sources for these insights, including Google Analytics 360, YouTube Analytics, product strategy and road mapping, and web-based dashboards for operational monitoring. The analysis concludes that Google's initiatives, particularly in areas like cloud transportation and artificial intelligence, are aimed at maintaining market dominance by integrating services into the digital user experience and addressing shifts in search mediums. The report provides a comprehensive overview of Google's strategic responses to its competitive landscape.

Running head: BUSINESS INITIATIVES
BUSINESS INITIATIVES
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Introduction
Strategic issues are considered to be some kind of development of trend occurring in the
internal or external situations of the business organization. Business initiatives imply the actions
or initiatives taken by the business organization in response to the changing business scenario
and the changing situations in the external or internal environment. Strategic planning is essential
for the business organization to plan the resource allocation and support the operations of the
business organization. The aim of this report is to identify the key business initiatives taken by
the selected business organization Google Inc. it analyzes the customer, product or operational
insights of the organization in order to support the business initiative taken by the business
organization. Further, it analyzes the data sources for understanding the key insights of the
customer, product and operations of the business organization.
Discussion
Key business initiatives faced by Google
According Carter and Price (2017), Google Inc has been faces various threats and
challenges such slow growth rate, increased competition and antitrust. It has been analyzed that
Google’s revenue growth has slowed in the past two years. The emergence of new and
competitive firms has slowed down the growth rate of the company. The smartphone users prefer
to use the apps for searching particular hotels, gifts and other items instead of Google search.
Further, the company has been criticized for giving preferential treatments to other local business
and reviews of restaurant (Hamilton 2016). Google, having a strong information and technology

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infrastructure the company has taken several initiatives to address to increasing level of
competition in the market and for its sustained growth.
According to Price and Wrigley (2016), the company plans to work with close
collaboration with various international organizations to predict any occurrence of calamities or
natural disaster. The company has been working with partners and other experts for improving
the flow of important data and information to improve their basic service and offerings. The
company will be enhancing its institutional support for the medium and the small scale business
organization in order to access larger financial market and enable them for more investment
opportunities. Further, as mentioned to Underwood et al. (2013), the company has undertaken
program such as renewable energy use for the purpose of reducing the utilization of coal and
utilize energy in a way that leads to a cheaper and more environmentally friendly manner.
Google Inc has also taken the initiative to invest $ 2 million for accelerating plug-in hybrid
electric vehicles. The company has been prioritizing areas such as Cloud transportation, artificial
intelligence and global addressable market to face the stiff competition in the market. It has taken
a multi-pronged approach to maintain its strength in the Google search and Google ads. These
are the areas where the company derives maximum revenue. The major issue that is faced by
Google is that search is migrating across mediums starting from desktop to mobile phones and
finally voice assistance. This shift has directly threatened the company in the field of search and
advertising. In order to address these issues, the company has been attempting to integrate its
services into digital user experience (Vise 2017). As business initiative the company plans to
focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning. It aims to maintain its search dominance in
the market by strategic investments, partnerships and acquisitions.

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Insights to support targeted business initiatives
Customer insights: According to Zhou, Fu and Yang (2016), in the highly competitive business
environment customers prefer using multiple devices and follow different ways and paths to
purchase. This consumer behavior can be considered as in insight and Google Inc can use them
to drive results. However, this can be highly challenges to the business organization. The
consumer prefers shopping by categories and segments with the use of their smartphone. The
consumer before making a purchase prefers getting access to the information online. The
consumers prefer conversational search queries such as specific or relevant questions. This
enables the consumers to get a quick answer. Further, the consumer prefers new things nearby
and as quickly as possible. The consumer prefers researching which helps them to build
anticipation and work out details (Underwood et al. 2013). By analyzing and collecting
information about the consumer behavior and gaining consumer feedback on the services
provided by the organization can help the company to develop strategic and objectives to fulfill
the needs and desires of the consumers.
Product insights: Undertaking product insights can help the business organization to have
deeper understanding of the product and services offered to the consumers and their likability.
According to Zhou, Fu and Yang (2016), Google’s products and service offerings such as
internet search engine, web email, cloud storage and other productivity applications like
spreadsheet, photo-editing software and word processing can be categorized into likelihood of
purchase, their likeability and repurchase probability. These metrics can help the business
organization to gain enough data for product insights. The company must design the product

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based on various market trends, research and forecasting. It needs to forecasts the future
expectations of the consumers and develops its own applications for mobile users as well as
desktop users.
Operational insights: According to Price and Wrigley (2016), in order to support the initiatives
taken by the business organization thrive on the benefit of the employees, products and
communities of the organization. The company has an equal opportunity workplace. They are
highly committed towards offering equal opportunity to every individual irrespective of caste,
gender, color or creed. The company has a separate team as operations and support. The
operations management of the company enables the organization to keep and organize all the
facilities and equipments running smoothly in order to address the decision area (Carter and
Price 2017).
Data sources for key insights
Tools for customer insights
Tools and technology such as Google Analytics 360 can be used by the business to address the
challenge of accessing customer behavior and turning it into an insight. As mentioned by Frank,
Mashevskaya and Ermolina (2016), the application and tools like Google Analytics 360 can be
used to gain information about the behavior of the consumers. It can be used by the business
organization to gain interface, perform customer analysis and get customer insights. YouTube
Analytics, Google analytics, Facebook audience insights, Google trends and other Google’s
audience retention tool can be used to track view of the consumer insights (Vise 2017).
Data sources for product insights

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As mentioned by Zhou, Fu and Yang (2016), product strategy and road mapping can used to
outline the strategy, ideas and features of the product. Through customer feedback applications
and tools can allow the customers to provide their views about the product or service offered.
This can be acquired through a web based interface. According to Price and Wrigley (2016),
User experience testing can be used by the organization such as mobile app analytics platform
which can offer the company with powerful and qualitative analytics tool for tracking and
optimizing in the UX app. The customer experience can be visualized from their point of view
and analyze their interactions in the form of reports, individual session replays and heat maps.
Further, the company can pushing in-app messages and welcome the consumers, drive them to
action and build long term relationship with the customers (Zhou, Fu and Yang 2016). By
organization and bring the teams together the company can create shared views of the product
planning. Office 365 can be used to create and share anywhere on the device.
Tools for operational insights
According to Carter and Price (2017),the operational insights of the company help the business
organization to get access to graphical KPI gauges which helps to display information and data
from any system. The web based dashboards can enable the business organization to build
various visualization elements for effectively monitoring the process of key performance
indicators. The alert icons, progress bars, trends of the business and gauges can be used to
monitor the operations and performance of the business organization (Carter and Price 2017).
Having a web based dashboard software can eliminate the need for excel sheets. Simple
calculation software can perform the real time calculations. The software can enable the
business organization for integrating data and collect data from all operational system of the
organization and display the required information in the KPI dashboard (Price and Wrigley

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2016). This will allow organization to monitor the sign and loopholes in the operational activities
of the organization and access its accuracy, comprehension and ease.
Conclusion
Therefore, from the above analysis it has been identified that the company has taken
various initiatives such as undertaking programs to renewable source of energy, prioritizing areas
such as cloud transportation and artificial intelligence. It has taken a multi-pronged approach for
strengthening Google search engine and Google. It attempts to integrate the services into digital
user experience. The customer, product and operational insights have been identified to support
the targeted business initiatives. Further, the data sources for the key insights have been
determined such as tools and applications to monitor the operations of the business, information
about customer and product insights.

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References
Carter, M.W. and Price, C.C., 2017. Operations research: a practical introduction. Crc Press.
Frank, E.V., Mashevskaya, O.V. and Ermolina, L.V., 2016. Innovational Mechanism of
Implementation of Cluster Initiatives in Business. European Research Studies, 19(1), p.179.
Hamilton, R., 2016. Consumer-based strategy: Using multiple methods to generate consumer
insights that inform strategy.
Price, R. and Wrigley, C., 2016. Design and a deep customer insight approach to
innovation. Journal of International Consumer Marketing, 28(2), pp.92-105.
Underwood, J., Neilson, P., Char, H., Shing, D., Horner, P., Underwood, M., Slaney, D. and
Evesson, G., Decentrix Inc, 2013. Method and apparatus for generating a web site with dynamic
content data from an external data source integrated therein. U.S. Patent 8,595,300.
Vise, D., 2017. The google story. Strategic Direction, 23(10).
Zhou, K., Fu, C. and Yang, S., 2016. Big data driven smart energy management: From big data
to big insights. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 56, pp.215-225.