• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

That was one of the rare occasions when I felt we made an avoidable error. As Susan conceded years later, "In the scope of things, it wasn't the right program for us to be running." The time and money could have been put to better use, though perhaps this was only obvious to me because the time and money belonged to my department. Larry saw staff productivity as infinitely expandable, and one more program to manage could hardly be considered an obstacle. If the affiliate program interfered with other responsibilities, then we would just work harder and longer. We were blessed with boundless opportunity, so our output would need to grow without limit.

When we pulled the plug, it didn't matter that Larry had originally been a proponent of the program. The financial data didn't support it, so we took it out back, put a stake through its heart, and buried it deep in the field of failed ideas.

Chapter 9

Wang Dang Doodle—Good Enough Is Good Enough

IT WAS HARD to let go of the absolutes I had clung to so tightly over a long career of managing brands. Sergey tried to help me by prying tenets from my rigid belief system and beating me over the head with them. Case in point, the daily affirmation I chanted to our logo's inviolate purity.

This is our logo.

It looks like this.

If it looks like this, it's our logo.

Because our logo looks like this.

One of the convictions I'd brought with me to Google, based on the two books I had read about branding, was that you needed to present your company's graphic signature in a monomaniacally consistent manner—to pound it into the public consciousness with a thousand tiny taps, each one exactly the same as the one before.

So when Sergey reminded me that he wanted us to play with Google's signature homepage graphic, I put my foot down. Remember, this was not merely the most prominent placement of our logo; it was the only placement of our logo. We weren't advertising on TV or on billboards or in print. The logo floating in all that white space was it. And though we had millions of users, we were hardly so well known that we could assume people already had our brandmark burned into their brains.

Sergey didn't see the big deal. He had changed the logo twice during Google's infancy, adding a clip-art turkey on Thanksgiving in 1998 and putting up a Burning Man* cartoon when the staff took off to explore nakedness in the Nevada desert. But now Google was a real company, I reminded him. Real companies don't do that.

Even as we argued, Sergey enlisted webmaster Karen White to resurrect the turkey for Thanksgiving, create a holiday snowman in December, and festoon the logo with a hat and confetti for New Year's 2000.

"What about aliens?" he asked. "Let's put aliens on the homepage. We'll change it every day. It will be like a comic strip that people come back to read."

I tried not to be condescending as I explained again why it was bad branding. I gave him my spiel about consistency of messaging and uniform touchpoints and assured him it wasn't just my opinion; it was the consensus of marketing professionals worldwide. Manipulating one's logo was identity dilutionary.

I knew I had finally convinced him when he stopped asking me about it.

I was wrong. Sergey wasn't convinced; he just didn't like repeating himself. So he turned to Susan instead. Susan didn't argue; she started looking for an artist to execute Sergey's vision. She found illustrator Ian Marsden and put him to work. In May 2000, Ian created the first Google Doodle.† It featured—surprise, surprise—aliens making off with our logo.

NYU professor Ken Perlin created a bouncing heart applet for Valentine's Day and a bouncing-bunny game for Easter. Larry showed his gratitude with an offer of Google stock sufficient to make the code Ken sent us, line for line, quite possibly the most expensive ever written.

Our users loved the randomness of the logo artwork and sent us dozens of appreciative emails. Google's brilliant strategy of humanizing an otherwise sterile interface with cute little cartoon creatures was