Plan Marketing Google +

Introduction to the case firm
Google Inc. was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when the two met at Stanford University with an initial capitalisation of 100,000 dollars from Andy Bechtolsheim. The company was established with the mission of organising the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful (). As part of its fundamental philosophy, the companybelieves that the ultimate way to achieve this mission is to put the need of the customer first (Chaffey, 2012). Among the most widely recognize products of the company include Web search, Google chrome, Translate, news docs map, Google+ and several others. It must be noted that the Google+ is our main products of focus in the subsequent discussions.
Given the intense pressure in the industry, thecompany compete with other vibrant industry players such as, yahoo, Microsoft, facebook, twitter, Amazon, just to mention a few. As part of its competitive effort, the company has over the years acquires more than 100 businesses thereby speding over 22billion in this acquisitions (Morris, 2012). In May 2012 for example, Google completed the acquisition of Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc for 12.5billion dollars (Morris, 2012). However, despite the intense competition the recorded consolidated revenue of 12.21 billion dollars in June 2012 and the operating income as at the end of the second quarter stood at 3.20 billion. Detailed information about the company’s financial performance has been provided as appendix to this report. In all, it will be interesting to note that 97% of the company’srevenue comes from advertising with only 3% from other sources.

2.2. Introduction of the specific business unit chosen
According to ()the core elements of Google’s business model are searching service, advertising service, Complementary value network, co-petition value network core technology and network platform technology. One of these network platform strategies we want to build our strategyand marketing effort around is the Google plus service. the google plus product was lauched in June 2011 and even though there has been skeptisism about the survival of the product, it has within one year of operations had 400 million subscribers with only 100 million as active users. The diagrame below shows how the product has progress since its introduction in June 2011.


Fig. 1. Google+users as of September 2012
Source: Google.com (2012)
When compared with other social network for example Facebook, the usage rate of G+ is very less and it has been estimated that visitors using personal computers spend an average of three minutes on G+ as compared to six to seven hours on Facebook. ComScore, (2012) as cited by (Efrati, 2012). This is not the very best and it is in this respectthat we have chosen this specific SBU of the company to develop our marketing plan around. With over 300 million non active users one of our marketing objectives will be to turn these non users to active users whilst trying to capture enough market share and ensuring users ultimate privacy and protection. Among some distinctive characteristics of this products are , circles, vertical integration,hurdle hangout and , sparks (Macrae 2011)


3. SITUATIONAL ANALYSIS
3.1. Competitiveness of the firm
3.1.1. Market analysis
3.1.2 Internal analysis
We begin our market analysis by using Michaels Porters Five forces matrix to understand the kind of industry we are operating in. According to Michael E Porter (2008) awareness of these forces that shapes an industry can assist a firm tounderstand the structure of its industry and as a result take a profitable position.
New Entrants
with the desire to capture enough market shares, new entrants can put much pressure in the indusrtrt (Porter, 2008). in the internet industry, the threats of new entrants is high probably due to low entry barriers and less revenue needed to enter the industry (investopedia, 2012). However earleir research...