E-Commerce

The Google Domination

Frankly speaking, it’s time to stop the second-guessing and open-heartedly accept that it’s Google’s turn now. The next decade clearly belongs to Google, so it’s best not to resist and go with the flow.

As a company, it’s amazing how Google started, what it’s done and where it’s now headed. There have been a lot of such great success stories in the past, from Coca-Cola to General Motors, and from IBM to Microsoft, but this one combined phenomenal speed with extraordinary accuracy and extremely high profitability. It has clearly cut a different path from the rest.

New World Order?

So what’s all this grumbling about its super power and domination?

Google is in the final stage of becoming the No. 1 media information company in the world. After all, when the early print-based society was suddenly faced with competition from radio and television, it had to adapt to a dramatic shift in audience behavior, altering the course of the media establishment.

During the last century, all those sudden technological changes altering the information flow changed societies. For now, we are stuck with the mobile reality of keypads, earphones and screens until we reach another next step of techno-evolution where possibly chips implanted in our head may do all the work.

The media-fusion is going through a metamorphosis. Google is writing the new code. The butterflies are taking off.

Advertising Superpower

As an advertising company — and the global ad agencies are mum about this — Google has already become the largest and most profitable, with the highest ratio of lead generation for its advertisers. True, the madmen of the traditional ad structure are horrified by the new development, and the top online players will further make it possible for Google to become the ultimate technology; to connect products with highly motivated customers via highly measurable pay-per-click-system, with an unlimited customer base. Imagine if, for a small fee per head, you know this very second where your next million customers are, ready to buy and swipe the card.

As a social medium, the fact that today Google may know much more about a person than his or her doctor, banker, spouse or boss makes the social play a small joke. Once all the dots are connected, the new Google channels will make interconnectivity an extraordinary phenomenon, and groups of people will be able to feel the value of all this information flow.

Corporate Tentacles

As a technology company, Google will have more power than what the top 50 technology companies had — combined — in the ’80s. The information flow connecting the borderless world is now far superior, and as consumers in developing nations move toward branded goods, global e-commerce will depend more on these global conduits.

As an information company, Google will soon offer tools to governments to stay in power; to undertake budgeting, costing, voting and demographic planning with intricate systems to control the mixed messages — all the way to polling and other goodies, online, in living color and with great accuracy. The daily living issues will be managed by search-driven responses to this very issue.

As a business tool, only corporations with high motivation to review all matters of cyber-branding and the complex jigsaws of their corporate branding, image and name identities will have a chance in the future, as the rest will simply be left with huge inventories, or holding tall empty buildings. The future clearly points to well informed marketing-driven business models, where name brands are 100 percent owned under the global protection of intellectual property, and clearly respected and recognizable by the ever more sophisticated global consumer.

The Importance of Branding

The online world is great, yet extremely cruel for those products and services whose brand names are just invisible and never climb to the top. Corporations that shy away rather than face the truth, avoiding professional audits that could measure the real power of their business names, will simply be left behind. The Google ad models will get more complex as global directories are stacked a mile high, and only those with Five Star Standard naming conventions have a chance to stay on the top.

The new ICANN policy making dramatic changes in global domain name registration, opening names to Chinese, Arabic and Cyrillic characters all combined, will have an explosive — yet positive — impact on the marketing-savvy organization. Trademarking will face new, but very positive, fronts. The bar of creating global visibility has been raised very, very high, putting immense pressure on the old traditional media, demanding new, almost indescribable platforms — and that’s where Google steps in.

The first decade of a Google world points to a long and an amazing journey, but on the progressive charts of techno-evolution it’s just a blink, so brace for the next. Bravo, Google — well done, and keep pushing the buttons.


Naseem Javed is recognized as a world authority on corporate image and global cyber-branding. Author of Naming for Power, he introduced the Laws of Corporate Naming in the 1980s and also foundedABC Namebank, a consultancy established in New York and Toronto a quarter century ago. He can be reached at[email protected].


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