How Google builds an education brand
Don’t be too surprised if in five or ten years the US educational establishment runs on Google, from the neighborhood school to the college campus. Google teams are hard at work making Google the digital platform of learning. Through these efforts, Google is positioning itself to be a preeminent brand of education. You may physically attend Harvard or Yale or PS 27, but you’ll spend most of your time there inside Google applications. In practice, you’ll be going to school in Google.
A Google brand play
The elements of Google’s emerging education brand are set forth in Google for Educators. This initiative is a Google brand play, taking shape before our very eyes. (A brand, let’s not forget, is a collaboration in context that creates new customers and new customer value.) Google is building programs to create customers in teachers, and in students. To build its brand it doesn’t need glitzy campaigns, high-octane messaging, costly Super Bowl ads, celebrity endorsers, iconic symbols, or throbbing slogans. This is a Google brand built from the bottom-up, through customers themselves and their communities.
A brand of deliverables, not promises
Significantly, Google is building its education brand through what it delivers, and by what it does, rather than by what it says or promises. Bands are deeds, not words, and brands rich in deliverables have the inside track to be recognized as brands of integrity and trust.
In education, integrity and trust are fundamental.
Google in the classroom
To see what Google is up to in the education market, look at the links in the above-noted Google for Educators site:
Building the integrated brand
One way to describe a brand is to call it “vertically integrated value.” Google already offers a broad scope of integrated tools for learning, incorporating Google search, Google Docs, and many other applications. These are the building blocks of an integrated brand. Basically, Google is covering everything a student or teacher would want to do in the collaborative learning process, made available from single drop-in cloud.
Students can take notes in Google, write essays, share and collaborate, create special projects, and communicate with blogs, podcasts and videos. Eventually, they will take their tests in Google, too, with stealthy algorithms to keep things honest.
And yes, there will soon be “Google Certified Teachers” who successfully complete the Google Teacher Academy.
A Google brand platform for education
What Google is building with its education initiative is a brand platform. Here is how I define that term:
The brand platform is a structure of integrated brand components architected to create focused customer growth. As a platform, it: 1) serves as a common foundation for brand program applications; 2) allows for greater efficiency in brand program development via shared elements; 3) leverages context and content across the brand; and 4) enables customers to extend the brand through bottom-up brand innovation avenues.
You can see how all these pieces are being fitted together. And you can foresee the pieces to come.
Photo: jisc_infonet — Flickr
