As a private multinational company, Google LLC was initially founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998. Since its inception, the company has risen to become one of the leading within the Internet-based services and the related product industry. Google offers some of the most competitive products and services such as software, cloud computing, search engines, online advertising technologies, and desktop systems. As a company operating in one of the most dynamic contemporary industry, Google LLC all along has placed itself strategically to maintain its market and to achieve its goals. The core competencies of Google focus on providing values to the customers to gain a competitive advantage while trying to maintain profitability and future financial success. The purpose of this paper is to assess the business and corporate level strategies employed by Google to provide customers values, gain competitive advantage while making a profit in the technological industry.

Business-Level Strategies

Since the Internet-related industry is quite competitive and dynamic, differentiation would be the best business-level strategy for the long-term success of Google. Differentiation allows the firm to provide value to the buyers by having products and services of the organization with unique features and characteristics instead of lowest prices. Some of the critical points of differentiation that Google could apply to include rapid innovation, high customer service, image management, high-quality products, and advanced technological features. A firm that reserves to differentiation creates value by lowering the costs of the buyers, improving their performance, and ensuring that there is sustainability.     Understanding the technological industry within which Google operates will help the company in the best way to achieve differentiation. The internet-based sector has a lot of rivalries where brand loyalty exists with less sensitivity to price changes. Customers need services that best satisfy their needs.

Currently, in terms of differentiation, Google continues to offer multiple unique products and services. These unique services are provided to different types of customers that have helped the company remains at the top when it comes to competition. The most popular service of Google is its web search engine that he provided the users with a more reliable way to search through the internet.  Google web search engine differentiates itself from other competing search engines using PageRank, a patented system. The weighted sum of the PageRank allows the system to compute a recursive score of the web pages to help deliver search inquiries that are linked to the pages. Thus, only relevant web pages are displayed to the user when making search inquiries. Thus, the reliability and simplicity of Google’s web search engine attract many users. Similarly, Google’s AdWords used in the online advertising business is the top notch for the company and makes Google advertising easy and faster. Thus, Google could ensure long-term success if it continues to embrace differentiation even more.

Many factors support Google’s application of the differentiation of business strategy. One of the factors coils around the Android operating system software new entrance that pauses high threat as several people continue to mimic it. However, by differentiating the search engine, it reduces this threat of new entrants on the condition that set standards must be met for them to be accepted by the buyers. Similarly, customers for the business look first for value, and this influences companies that place an online advertisement to consider first knowing areas that would provide them with a high return on investment. Google can place itself strategically by ensuring that relevant websites are provided efficiently. Despite the rare products of Google, it will have an answer for common and uncommon searches. Google can as well position itself by offering exceptional services by providing links that become very useful than expected which other companies could not achieve. The same way, differentiation would assist Google to develop products whose imitation by anyone would take long enough and would not even manage the copying. Thus, users would feel more secure when using Google products.

Corporate-Level Strategies

The corporate level strategy of a company is the broadest and is developed alongside the mission of the company. The corporate strategy provides means through which the marketing functional areas resources are used. At the same time, the corporate approach ensures the coordination of the human resources, finance, production and research to ensure the goals of the organization are achieved. For instance, a stability strategy may be used when it wants to set its present course as being steady. In the stability strategy, the company looks at the available resources and how to develop competitive market resources. The growth strategy involves the company opting for a sustainable approach that will allow it to get to the top of the industry through expansion and increased profitability. The retrenchment strategy, on the other hand, works for the industry when its survival is at stake. For Google, the best corporate-level strategy for its long term success is the diversification strategy since the internet-based sector is expanding faster.

The diversification strategy examines the products and services of the company and focuses on having a strategy that will ensure the company successful access the market and make enough sales. The company may establish a product line beyond what it currently offers at the corporate level. The company may use diversification to become the leader in the niche by limiting the number of products to one or only a few. At the same time, it can ensure dominance by having as many numbers of products as possible in the market. Google has been able to achieve applying diversification strategy by innovations, acquisitions, and corporate entrepreneurship. The strategy started with the search, but this has grown into something big and different as the company has been identifying small startup companies that are innovative and acquire them. The acquisition by Google has been regardless of weather the companies are unrelated areas. In 2001, the number of these unrelated companies was 26, but by 2015, the number stood at 178 acquisitions. The decision has been useful to Google regarding increasing the market offerings while decreasing the competition exposed to in the industry.

Despite these efforts by Google to use diversification, 95% of the company’s revenue still comes from the search engine. Therefore, diversification strategy still a better choice for Google when considering their corporate level strategy only that the company needs to consider constant innovation and increase product lines and expansion. It should consider moving into other industries like health, news, blogging, maps, and mobiles. Though Google has already embraced some of these areas and others like Google Apps and Enterprise; the company should consider going global to expand markets and outsource.

Competitive environment

Google LLC offers internet-based products and services including software, online advertising, and search engines. However, the main area of service provision by Google is search engine online advertising. Google has gained a lot of dominance over its main rival Yahoo regarding search engine because of its comprehensiveness, relevance, speed, and higher user experience. Since this Internet-based service is on high demand by users, buyers look for specific websites that will offer many features they want to access. The buyers also want the services that will deliver what is relevant and in a manner that is organized, speed, and easier to use. On the other hand, Yahoo gains a competitive advantage by the fact that it is a fully fledged internet portal. The searchers are steered towards yahoo browser and services.

The two companies, Google and Yahoo use different strategies at the business and corporate level to gain a competitive advantage. Google has a variety of free online products that are capable of attracting the highest number of internet users who use the products. Google also has numerous compliments that are arranged based on the number of users with Facebook and YouTube being at the top because of the highest number of users of these sites. At the same time, Google has the highest level of capitalization at 378 billion while Yahoo has a capitalization of 42 billion. Considering the differentiation strategy, Google has focused on adding unique features on the Internet-based search engine such as PageRank. The feature allows the ranking of the web pages depending on their relevance giving users an easier time to access the relevant information. Additionally, services such as online advertising have been added features including AdWords making it the top-notch service. New standards have been added to operating system software to reduce the chances of mimicking by others

In comparison to Yahoo, it uses the strategy of powering and delighting the advertisers, users, and publishers. Yahoo has differentiated its services to offer search services, branded programming, personalized content, shopping services, and communication tools. Yahoo has the Generalized search engine that has both Yahoo and Bing thus allowing the user to use the most convenient feature of the company. Yahoo has as well diversified to offer other services such as communication tools, health, advertisement, and news. However, Yahoo has not been as successful as Google in meeting the demands of users. In the long run, Google is the most likely to be a successful company than Yahoo.

Market Cycles

In the fast cycle market, the first movers drive the benefits though; the company does not have the loyalty to the product in this market. The firms in this fast cycle market will have to struggle for them to gain the market share. Due to the innovativeness of the rapid cycle market, firms are required to earn quick profits. However, in slow cycle markets, the imitators shield the firms over a long period thus making imitation costly.

The choice of Google as a successful company in the long-run would not differ in the slow-cycle market since the company will still launch new products to counter competitors. In the slow-cycle, Google will focus on protecting its unique competencies so that it can gain the needed market share. The reason for the continued benefit of Google in slow-cycle is because competitors will not understand it or imitate it since imitating its products is costly. In the fast-cycle market, the survival of Google will depend on innovation which should focus on gaining new competitive advantage. Since Google applies expensive technologies which cannot be imitated, it will remain within the competitive edge over the competitors thus increasing high market share. Google has been consistent in innovation; therefore, it will be expected that the firm maintains rapid change in the fast cycle to continue being at the top.

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