I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [169]
I believed I had identified the deep benefit of our brand for users (enabling better decisions) and developed an identity in GoogleLogic broad enough to encompass everything from our technology to our hiring process. It moved us well beyond PageRank, the name for Larry's original ranking algorithm. PageRank only applied to Google's search engine, and even there it had been largely supplanted over time. GoogleLogic positioned us on a much bigger playing field of products and services. And it had that nice echo of the g and the l, almost as if "Google" and "logic" were mirrored halves of the same entity.
Jonathan and Cindy and Susan sent positive feedback, but I heard nothing from Larry or Sergey. I pinged them a couple of days later. Still no response. When, after another two months, I finally pushed Sergey for a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, I did it as an "assumptive sale": I assumed it was okay to publish our five thematic messages company-wide unless anyone had objections.
"I have an objection," came Sergey's long-awaited reply. "I think they need more thought." That was it. I'd been down this path before. I trapped him in his office and demanded more specific direction.
"Doug," he said, "I think you're slipping back into your old big-company ways. I don't know where this came from, but I don't see any point to it. Why do we need this kind of thing?"
Uh. Buduh. Duh. He apparently had no recollection of the six months of updates our Baby Beagle group had been sending him.
"I will not smite Sergey," I counseled myself. "I will not smite Sergey." I walked him through the process and the applications for a unified messaging strategy with press and our users. I explained the benefits of having a positioning platform that we could build brand extensions on. He shrugged. He didn't see it, but if it was that important to me, fine. I could post it on the marketing page on MOMA. I was glad to have such an enthusiastic endorsement from the man who, just a week before, had been named "Marketer of the Year" by Marketing Computers magazine.
And, of course, Sergey turned out to have a point. I had convinced myself that our engineers would love the concept of GoogleLogic. They didn't. It wasn't impressive enough. They suggested "GoogleMagic!" Now that, they said, had some punch to it.
Other than my colleagues in PR, no one at Google was thinking much about our messaging strategy. Not yet. It wasn't all that important to people focused on building products, even when George Reyes joined us as chief financial officer in September 2002—crossing another big item off our pre-IPO checklist. Presumably, if we ever went public, we'd need some coherent story to tell Wall Street, but no one seemed terribly concerned about that now.
I put it aside and dove into working with sales on winning more advertisers and helping our PMs prepare the products they were pushing through the pipeline. Tim Armstrong and his salespeople always seemed grateful for any effort we made on their behalf. Jonathan's group just got hungrier for more. We had a continual tug of war over who would do what and what was reasonable to expect, and Jonathan got tired of it. So when I copied him on a note confirming who would write a customer newsletter, his short fuse burned down to powder and he blew up.
"I don't want to get in an email debate over who owns what," he stormed to the group. "I can't get into monthly debates over ownership." There had been no debate in this case, just a reiteration of responsibilities. Unbeknownst to Jonathan, there was a performance issue with a member of marketing that needed to be documented in writing. My note had been intended in part to do that. Given Jonathan's VP role and his growing reputation