Authors: Douglas Edwards
I worked with the PMs on budgets for their 2003 initiatives, a task I could no longer complete satisfactorily with wild-assed guesses and a couple of bullet points. We had a CFO who paid microscopic attention to detail, and even Eric was heard to mutter, "Shit, we'd better take this seriously. We're going to be a billion-dollar company." He joked that we'd better not screw up things like audit trails that might send him to jail, an increasingly common destination for CEOs in the wake of the Enron meltdown. He said it so often, I came to realize he wasn't joking.
My world had grown large enough to split apart through mitotic division. Customer service was absorbed by Sheryl Sandberg's world o' AdWords, and marketing communications took up residence in Jonathan Rosenberg's product-management realm under the stewardship of Christopher Escher. Escher's groups would be devoted to supporting our revenue initiatives, which thankfully freed me from grinding out sales collateral and presentations. My new role revolved entirely around the products and services touched directly by users, so Cindy changed my title to director of consumer marketing and brand management.
My circle on Google's Venn diagram of responsibilities now overlapped Marissa Mayer's almost completely. She shepherded new services to market. I branded them. But branding originated with the products and the text included in them. So who made the final decision on what that text should say? The product manager or the brand manager? Ah, there's the rub.
Marissa let me know that she viewed me as the product marketing manager (PMM) for
Google.com
. I was comforted by the notion that I had a structural role defined within the new world order but unnerved by the realization that, according to her logic, I should be part of product management under Jonathan, not working in Cindy's corporate marketing group. I had nothing against Jonathan, but working for Cindy was like attending a small, high-caliber liberal arts college. Working for Jonathan would be like enrolling at MIT.
I didn't want to go to MIT.
My squabbles with Marissa over user-interface issues had ebbed and flowed, with the launch of Google news in September 2002 bringing both high points and lows. Marissa took particular pride in Google news, which automatically scanned thousands of news sources and extracted the ones that seemed most important. Krishna Bharat had started it as a side project, and after 9/11 had worked on it in earnest. Marissa made sure that Google news, like a favored child, moved to the front of the line for whatever goodies the company doled out. One of those was positioning as a tab right above the search box on the
Google.com
homepage. When the UI team questioned why we hadn't met to discuss such a major change, Marissa asserted it had always been planned that way.
It was hard to miss the shift in decision-making authority away from the UI team, where all members ostensibly had equal votes, to the product team, over which Marissa now held sway.
I saw it firsthand in working with Marissa on the language our site would use to describe Google news. As was often the case, the wording was still being finalized the night before the product launch. Marissa wanted to emphasize the automated nature of Google news by saying, "No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this page." To me it sounded awkward and, worse, like a slap in the face to the journalists and editors whose stories we would be aggregating. I heard its tone as implying, "Look! We've built a machine that does your job better than you! You're not needed anymore, so why don't you take your Pulitzers and Polks and put yourselves out to pasture?"
Marissa didn't hear it that way. She found the reference to animal testing irresistibly humorous, though I pointed out to her that no humans were harmed in the creation of a printed newspaper either. "It's amusing," I conceded, though I didn't really believe it, "but it's going to wear thin very quickly. A lot of folks won't get it at all."
It all balanced out, though. Marissa was equally unhappy with the language I had written into the FAQ explaining Google news: "Google news is highly unusual in that it offers a news service compiled solely by computer algorithms without human intervention. Google employs no editors, managing editors, executive editors, or other ink-stained wretches."
She grimaced at "ink-stained wretches," a phrase I knew, from my seven years working at a newspaper, was a term of endearment among journalists. "It's a badge of honor," I assured her, "a tip of the hat to them to show we're on their side."
She polled the engineering team working on news, and they all hated it. Schwim, the ops guy, chimed in that he found it insulting. When the first iteration of Google news rolled out the next morning, "ink-stained wretches" was out and "no humans harmed" was in.
The "no humans harmed" line got noticed by the press. Some of the attention was positive, some not. Almost all the news reports I saw categorized the statement as boastful. Some also referred to the suffering of "ink-stained editors" who now would find their jobs threatened. I didn't point out that our critics had applied the "ink-stained" appellation to themselves without our prompting. Even years later, the line, which only stayed up a couple of weeks, is well remembered by journalists. When Google news began experimenting with adding human editors in June 2010, Phil Bronstein of the
San Francisco Chronicle
noted that our "no humans harmed" wording had "never made those of us who are, for the most part, human editors feel all that great."
*
I can't honestly claim that my version would have been perceived any differently. It could very well have been much worse. The notion of automated news selection put journalists of all stripes on edge, and would have done so even if we hadn't placed any text explaining it on the site. What struck me, though, was my inability to persuade Marissa to see my point of view. And whenever that happened, Marissa's perspective prevailed.
Google news wasn't the only new product in the hopper. We had a product-search service scheduled to launch before the end of 2002 as well. The product team had assigned it the code name "Froogle."
"I was hoping you could help us out with a tagline for Froogle for the launch," Pearl Renaker, the PM for the new product, said to me in late August 2002.
"I'd love to," I told her, but thought to myself, "Uh-oh." It occurred to me that I had not been in any discussions about the "real" name that would replace "Froogle" when it went live. I suddenly got the feeling that the code name was no longer just a code name. Pearl confirmed it.
"We'd like to brand it as Froogle, but position it as a brand extension of Google." It was still a couple of months until launch. I had time to explain all the reasons that was a really bad idea.
My objections to naming our new feature "Froogle" were grounded in the brand architecture I had worked out with Salar, but more important, in Google's tradition of "underpromise and overdeliver." Salar and I had agreed when we launched the Google directory in 2000 that new products would all be under the Google name and just have descriptive titles: Google directory, Google image search, Google news. Froogle would be the first product to break that mold and set up an independent brand. Essentially, it would be saying that Google was no longer the one place to go for all searches. Users would have to choose one brand or the other. And it would set a dangerous precedent for future brand proliferation. Would we now create a name for every new service we developed?
I did see advantages to establishing an independent brand as a platform for commerce-related services. If Froogle was being positioned as a competitor to Amazon, with shopping carts and buyer reviews and one-click technology, it might make sense to give it its own Google-derived identity. But Froogle wasn't up to that challenge.
The Froogle prototype I had been trying out found products for sale on the web and ranked them according to "relevance," which didn't mean much when you had thirty identical waffle irons all offered at the same price. We did have "objectivity." Our partner Yahoo charged most merchants to be included in their product search, and Yahoo's search results sent users to Yahoo stores instead of directly to the merchants' sites. Yahoo had an editorial team making decisions, while we used a completely automated, and thus "purer," system, unaffected by paid relationships with merchants.
That was pretty much it.
There was no way to buy anything on Froogle without leaving the site. There were no product reviews. There were no merchant ratings. You couldn't sort by store, by brand, or by price. There was no way to do anything other than click on a link and go somewhere else. It was a search for finding products—a product search. That, I thought, is what we should call it: "Google product search." Calling it "Froogle" gave the impression that it was a comprehensive, full-fledged service, not a feature. People would bring to their first experience with Froogle all the expectations we had trained them to have for new Google services. They would expect "the Google of commerce." Instead, they would get—product search.
I went to Salar and the UI team to be sure they were aligned with my thinking. They were. Salar didn't like the name because the "frugal/Froogle" pun wouldn't translate internationally. Some English speakers might not get it either. Now I had to convince the people who could stop the runaway train before it got to the end of the line. I would argue my case at the Froogle GPS.
Each major product now had a forum dedicated to it. These get-togethers were dubbed "Google Product Strategy" (GPS) meetings and were attended by executives who could alter the launch timing, correct off-target plans, or completely change the features and purpose of the product in mid-development. Larry, Sergey, and Eric were there, along with Jonathan, Salar, Susan, and Marissa.
When my turn to speak came, I made my case to what I perceived as a hostile jury. I acknowledged the advantages of a memorable name for a product that was fully baked, but pointed out that our product search had barely gone into the oven. I laid out, logically and concisely, all the issues that made "Froogle" a poor choice, and I closed by suggesting that we should hold the name in reserve to apply when "Google product search" truly deserved its own brand. Better to underpromise now, I suggested, and overdeliver. I stopped talking and sat back, confident that Clarence Darrow could not have delivered a more cogent brief.
Sergey looked around the table. "I like, 'Froogle,'" he said. "It's kind of funky and different. I think it's cute."
That wasn't the end of it. Eric charged Salar, Susan, and me with presenting an alternative to "Froogle" at the next GPS. We agreed on "Google product search," presented it, defended it, and were overruled.
That
was the end of it. Of that part at least. But then the question of the tagline arose.
None of our other Google services had a tagline—a marketing slogan intended to get people to use a product. All our services had straightforward descriptive text on their homepages, explaining what they actually did. Text like "The most comprehensive image search on the web," or "Search and browse 4,000 continuously updated news sources." Perhaps because Froogle was a product dealing with commerce, there was suddenly a yen for a real marketing tagline.
The board of directors had saved the marketing department the trouble of developing one. "The board really likes, 'All the world's products in one place,'" Eric announced at the November Froogle GPS. They wanted us to plaster it everywhere on the site. A great tagline, but obviously and provably false. I set about changing everyone's minds.
Fortunately, Marissa and I were in agreement that the board's wording promised too much. Unfortunately, we disagreed on whether the replacement should emphasize relevance (Marissa) or objectivity (me). We batted emails back and forth like Pong professionals, each making the case for our own word. That debate dragged on for weeks, until Larry said "objectivity" was out. I think it may have cut too close to the bone for Yahoo, which was still a major partner.
I countered with the line "Find products for sale from across the web." It was a purely descriptive phrase devoid of any marketing spin, and it avoided insulting our partners. Five days before the scheduled launch, no one had objected to it. Pearl informed me my line would be the one on the site because it was the least controversial. I had lost the "Froogle" war but won the tagline battle. Small consolation, but I savored it.
The next day, the executive staff changed the Froogle homepage line back to "All the world's products in one place." The word came down that Larry and our board member John Doerr both liked the wording. No—they loved it. My teaspoonful of victory now tasted overwhelmingly of ashes.
On December 11, 2002, Froogle launched with little fanfare. We pushed it out the door quietly so as not to overly alarm Yahoo or AOL about our entry into an area they might view as competitive. But a new product from Google could no longer slip into the mainstream without making a splash. Froogle quickly became the center of a global media storm. Google was challenging the major players in e-commerce with a new shopping site. We were compared to Yahoo, to AOL, to Amazon, though clearly we offered few of the features of a full commerce site. Traffic to Froogle peaked high, then tapered off, and then, after the Christmas shopping season, plummeted sixty-five percent.
Also plummeting was enthusiasm for our tagline. Cindy heard feedback from her contacts in the press that our braggadocio was an unwelcome departure from our usual understated approach. "I don't like the tagline," one reporter told her. "I think Google as a search service never made any grand or best-in-the-world-type claims. The effect of this extreme form of, 'underpromise, overdeliver' philosophy has been to make me feel certain that Google is supremely well conceived and fully worthy of every bit of trust that users place in it." Our new tagline violated that principle, and did so for a product that "was not equally well conceived nor equally worthy of users' trust."