Describe and evaluate the effectiveness of Google 's approach to business strategy; that is, how is Google creating a sustainable competitive advantage?
Google’s Approach to Business Strategy and its Sustainable Competitive Advantage
Google has created the most popular search engine and organized the information in such a manner that it has created a sustainable competitive advantage as is clear from the fact that although the search engine was started in 1997, the company is still having its domination in the search engine market with a market share of 67.5% in Feb. 2013 as per the data released by comScore, the leading (comScore, 2013: Mar. 13). Company has created a first mover advantage by aggressively building its search engine by adding to it Google Books, Google Scholar, Google Finance, Google News, Google video, Google Images etc. which helped the user search with specific key words. The company has been able to sustain its competitive advantage as is also clear from the fact that General Sentiment, a social analytical company has ranked Google topping the list of brands with a brand value of $756.6 million even surpassing Apple’s brand value (Reisinger, 2012: Aug. 2). This is a result of its innovative products and heavy expenditure on sales and marketing. Google invested $6.143 billion in 2012 on sales and marketing which is 12.2% increase over investment of $4.589 billion in 2011 on sales and marketing (Google, 2012: n.d). There was addition of advertising expenses of $288 million in 2012 (Google, 2012: n.d) which is a reflection of how the company invests in brand building of its products. The diversification move undertaken by the company is the result of innovation at Google and extensive research and development with R&D expenses continuously increasing from $3.8 billion in 2010 to $5.2 billion in 2011 and $6.8 billion in 2012 (Google, 2012: n.d). Although there were initial problems with the
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