Sometime in 2008, Nikesh Arora, then the Head of Google European, Middle Eastern and African operations, ran into the famed marketing guru Philip Kotler at a seminar in Dubai. Kotler’s 4Ps of marketing — getting the product, pricing, place and promotion right — is considered a gospel for modern business.
Arora asked him a very fundamental, if not irreverent, question: What happens to the 4Ps principle if three out of the four Ps are zero? Google’s products are free, the company doesn’t advertise (at least didn’t then) and there isn’t any specific placement of its products. The only P Google has is the Product. Kotler apparently brushed aside the query.
If Kotler was flabbergasted at Arora’s question, he isn’t the only one. Google’s single P formula to achieve the two most elusive Ps of business — Popularity (75 per cent share of the Internet search) and Profits ($4.3 billion in 2008 at a margin of almost 30 per cent) — has confounded many.
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