Google Chrome Marketing Launch Analysis

Jan., 2000 - News on browsers died eight years ago at the start of the new millennium. AOL bought Netscape, everyone was using IE. Mozilla, then Firefox, tried to make a comeback, but it was clunky, slow and bloated for a long time. Browser news became boring.

Sept 3, 2008 - One day after Google announced a beta version of an open source browser, there are 6,000 news stories and 50,000 blog postings on "Google Chrome." It is also the top trending topic on Twitter. They've clearly reached their target audience and created excitement over a browser with a big vision, but limited feature differentiation from Mozilla Firefox and IE. Their marketing team rocked. How did they sell the vision?

Comic Book
Google produced a sophisticated comic book that explained the problem and vision in simple terms. The comic was drawn by Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics, and Making Comics. The comic appears to have been distributed to reporters both in online and physical formats prior to the beta launch of Google Chrome. Google distributed the comic under the Creative Commons license. This led to a viral distribution of the comic online even before Google released their own version online. Writers scanned the physical comic book into digital format and released their own version of it. In my opinion, the comic book was the most innovative and effective technique Google used.

Corporate Blog
Google stoked the media fires by pushing out information on their official corporate blog at 10pm on September 1, Labor Day. The post was done by Sundar Pichai, VP of product management, and Linus Upson, engineering director. The Google blog is enabled with Site Feed subscriptions and a link to their YouTube channel.

Wikipedia
Someone created a stub file for Google on Wikipedia at 4:17pm on September 1, Labor Day. Twelve hours later, before the start of the business day on Tuesday, there are 100 edits to Wikipedia and there is a fully-formed Wikipedia entry for Google Chrome.

YouTube Technical HowTO Videos
With each passing month, Google seems to master the art of pushing out complex technical information on YouTube. The Google Chrome videos are an average of 20 seconds long and are focused only on closeups of screen shots. Fantastic. Remember, it is usually easier to make things longer. They seem to be experimenting with the proper length for videos and are getting closer to the ideal. The videos on technical features are neatly organized on an uncluttered page.

YouTube Videos Technical Vision Human Story
Google also released "The story behind Google Chrome," a 4:50 minute video that featured their development team talking on different technical aspects of Google Chrome. They got everyone on-message about why a browser was developed and the three key issues it addresses: 1) Speed; 2) Stability; 3) Security.

YouTube Video Press Conference
Google held a physical press conference, videotaped the conference and put it up on YouTube.

Twitter
Google Chrome is the number one trending topic on twitter, ahead of Sarah Palin and McCain. With so many channels of information pushed out to the public, Google was able to leverage tens of thousands of bloggers and Twitter users. Before the week is over, the viral effect may reach hundreds of thousands of these community publishers using blogs and micro-blogs.

Messaging
Considering the number of communication channels used, Google's organization of the messaging was phenomenal. The browser brings web applications closer to desktop applications by improving speed, stability and security.

Note: I've updated this information on a new post on the Page One PR corporate blog. Check it out here.