Google: What's behind the brand?

Published on Thursday 30 December 2010 20:01

SILICON Valley. Just the name itself conjures up images of hundreds of unimaginably intelligent, geeky young engineers from all over the world beavering away to create the next big thing; of giant microchips and futuristic gadgets; James Bond-esque sliding doors and rows of flat screens as far as the eye can see. But, winding through the Californian roads, the reality is underwhelming.

• Google's Mountain View, California headquarters

Ordinary- looking industrial estates peek out from behind ordinary-looking trees. Ordinary-looking workers trudge their ordinary way to work, where, I am now certain, they will sit at ordinary desks – not unlike my own in Edinburgh – and probably drink a cup of ordinary tea while they wait for their computer to boot up.

Then I spot a road sign.

It bears the iconic green background and white lettering of any American road sign, but this one does not direct drivers to a town or city. Instead, it tells me that I am now officially on the road to Google.

Entering the Google Mountain View campus, the ordinariness is gone. It feels like another world. A shiny, bright coloured, highly branded world.

As I walk towards the main reception, one "Googler" – the company's name for a member of staff – waves as he cycles by on a brightly coloured bike, immediately recognisable as having been painted in the primary colours of the Google logo. The friendly worker is followed by another on an identical machine – and then another. Soon, I spot a row of the bikes lined up against the wall. Boris Johnson, eat your heart out.

"They're campus bikes, we can just hop on them and take them to other buildings whenever we want," explains my host, Google's public affairs manager Parag Chokshi.

The Google bikes are well used. Spanning an area of more than 4 million square feet, with no less than 40 main buildings, workers need an easy way to get about. Most, however, are young and fit.

With the exception of senior management, the majority of Googlers roaming the campus are unfeasibly young. Most would not look out of place at nearby Stanford University, age-wise, and all are sporting jeans, trainers and hooded sweatshirts – many branded with the ubiquitous Google logo. At the grand old age of 30, clutching an ancient Nokia phone and wearing a dress and heels, I feel out of place in this saturation of laid-back youth and cutting-edge technology.

I suddenly realise how much the Google brand is imprinted on all of our consciousness. During an ordinary working day, I must say "I just googled that …" a hundred times, while some "Google Doodles" – pictures adorning the Google logo on its home search page to commemorate holidays, anniversaries etc have become well-recognised works of art in their own right.

Here, in the heart of Google, the brand is imprinted not just on our consciousness, but absolutely everywhere. The cafe's umbrellas are the red, green, blue and yellow of the logo and a huge collage, made up of tiny pictures of staff's faces to create the white background and coloured logo, decorates the main building's entrance hall.

Hanging on the walls, as in most American buildings, are defibrillators – machines used to save the lives of heart attack victims – but these are primary coloured and stamped with the Google brand.

The "interactive garden", which allows Googlers to pick their own tomatoes and basil for an on-the-go-snack, boasts a white sign warning greedy workers to take their fair share with the well-kent Google motto "don't be evil" – signed off with a mini logo, of course.

And the branding is not confined to working hours. Staff suffering withdrawal symptoms from all things Google at home can get help for their addiction at the on-campus shop, where they can spend their hard Google-earned cash on anything from a $2.55 Google mousemat to a $100 Google beanbag.

In the reception lobby, as I wait for a pre-programmed name badge to print off from an automated machine, giant screens display real-time Google searches. A quick experiment, however, using the free computers provided for visitors, reveals that not all queries are displayed. To be fair, it would be tricky to do so, considering that on a normal day the company deals with more than 1 billion individual searches.

In the past five years, as Google's global workforce has increased sevenfold to more than 23,000 employees, the internet giant's headquarters is thought to have expanded into more than double the amount of space it utilised just five years ago.

Just a few days before my visit, reports claimed that plans are being drawn up by Google to create a development of homes (already dubbed "Googletown" by the local press) in a corner of its vast site – something Chokshi would not confirm. The houses, designed predominently for Googlers and their families, would have the same ethos as the rest of the campus, it is thought. Facilities such as sports venues, parks, childcare, gourmet grocers and restaurants would be provided and as an added bonus for the company, hard-working Googlers would be on hand to reach the office with just a few minutes notice. "It is a great place to work, but they definitely work us hard," admits one member of the company's perpetually smiling staff, grabbing a bite to eat in the complimentary "No Name" cafe, which offers hungry Googlers free locally sourced food. The appetising menu today includes that all-American delicacy of grits, accompanied by clam chowder and a vegetable minestrone soup. In fact, all food and drink on the campus is free. An ice cream machine offers 24-7 access to a 99 cone Mr Whippy would be proud of, while fridges dotted about the campus hold a range of free drinks and snacks including organic iced tea, yogurts, fruit and milk.

This is not all.

Plastic napping pods, the size of a small bed, are available in every building for weary Googlers to take a quick 40 winks in between generating the ideas which helped the company make $6.5 billion profit last year.

A tiny swimming pool for staff use – more of a plunge pool than something which could be used for an athletic workout – lies a few feet from the main building, from which Googlers can admire the close-to-life-size dinosaur sculpture and statue park which decorates the main walkway through the campus. Google-branded beanbags – in the corporate green, blue, red and yellow – adorn break-out areas, where workers can bounce ideas off each other over a game of pool. I hear tales of Google-branded basketball courts, football pitches and gyms, tucked away on more remote parts of the campus. But all these perks – and quirks – are not provided lightly. In recent years, Google has had to work hard to hang on to its staff. The growth of new American technology companies such as Twitter and Facebook has sparked the migration of many former Googlers. And Google, which moved into its first Mountain View building in 1999 as a promising young start-up itself, has tried to increase its benefits – and hammer home its USP of a crazy, creative working environment – in a bid to retain valued employees.

Nestled in the corner of a wide, open plan office is a white, padded, Mongolian-style yurt. Around six hoodie-wearing Googlers are packed inside while others sit at ordinary open-plan desks just feet away, holding what our guide tells us is an ordinary, standard meeting.

"When we first moved into this particular building, we were experimenting with different kinds of air flow management," explains Chokshi, vaguely. "The tents were part of that. I'm not really sure whether they made a difference, but a few of them have stayed – we use them as meeting rooms."

Google is keen to play up its environmental credentials. It claims it has been technically carbon neutral since 2007 – proffering a complicated system of retrospectively offsetting its carbon emissions for the past three years. In addition to investing $45m in renewable energy plants across the United States, it has created on the roof of its HQ what was, at the time of construction three years ago, the largest-ever corporate solar power development in the US.

On the green transport front, the firm proudly provides a shuttle bus which ships more than 2,000 of its Mountain View employees (estimates of how many people actually work at the HQ range from 8,000 to 17,000, although Google likes to keep the exact number under wraps) between San Francisco and the Google campus 40 miles away in a bid to knock down car useage among its workforce. Around a quarter of its fleet of pool cars are environmentaly friendly electric hybrid vehicles Toyota Priuses, which are charged in a covered garage and proudly shown off to visitors.

But the company refuses to publish either its energy consumption or its CO2 output. "We don't discuss numbers," parrots Google's Green Energy Czar Bill Weihl.

Those naughty staff who do bring their own vehicle to work are directed to the correct car park by giant, Google Map markers which, so familiar in their usual 5mm form on screen, make me feel a little like Jeff Bridges in Tron, transported into the digital world.

I am now not just using Google – I AM Google.

After just a couple of hours at Mountain View, I am institutionalised. If you cut me open, you'll find red, blue, yellow and green stripes running through my veins.

I need to get back into the real world.

As I prepare to leave, Chokshi points out a huge trio of screens erected in a main walkway, which displays a giant version of Google Earth. A couple of workers are standing round it, typing in addresses.

"Look – that's the Google campus right there!" he says excitedly, as the Google Earth users zoom in on a brightly coloured, vast development. But as I get closer to the screens, he changes his mind.

"Oh wait, it's not Google they're looking at after all," he says. A pause. "I think it's actually Disneyland."