1. INTRODUCTION:

The first doodle was designed in 1998 when co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin used it as an out-of-office while they were at Burning Man. They wanted to let users know they were away in case the servers crashed.

It was an intern, who came with innovative doodle design for Bastille Day, i.e. National day of France, in year the year 2000, i.e. two years after first doodle was made by Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Bastille Day Doodle, made by Dennis Hwang, current webmaster at Google now, became popular among users, showing spike in search hits, to just see the doodle.

After the initial success, Dennis was appointed as Doodle Chief at Google, prior to which, Doodles on Google Homepage became more frequent, which in next few years became, core part of Google Branding Strategy.

In founding years, Doodle team, majorly focused on holidays, major events, in and around United States and European Union, but as the reach of google increased, and the results from last run showed extremely positive results, it was just matter of time, Doodle started finding it new homes, in various countries and Doodle Team went International. Doodle Team, consisted of creative minds, with varying backgrounds, including, engineers, illustrators, etc. Every Google Doodle is designed in such a way, that the name “Google”, is visible to users, and yet they get a Doodle to see, which brings smiles on the faces, all over the world. Following the same principle, the team has created around 2000 Doodles, which were used on Google Homepage in various parts of the world. The Doodle Team who design Google Doodles are known as "Doodlers".

Generally, we see that every Google doodle represents any special issue, celebrity, or a character. Google Doodle Team using the strategy of superimposing their logo with creatives to send a message — let it be elections in India or Valentine’s day, done by artful collection of the logo on the homepages that commemorate holidays, events, achievements. Doodles are not only for showing its devotion to the things it represents, but also for providing fun to people with like Pacman and guitar. It pays homage to celebrities by making a doodle for them. It wishes its user on birthdays if they are logged in, on that day.

In the era of aggressive branding done by major players of the world business, Google, has created a whole new level of competition, and no doubt, this step was “very clever and creative”.

2. SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW METHODOLOGY:

Systematic literature reviews are a sort of reviews that utilizes systematic strategies to gather optional information, basically to evaluate various aspects related to review topic. Systematic review investigates these questions that are wide or narrow in scope, and recognize, further combining all the considerable literature that specifically identify with the research question. They are intended to give an entire, comprehensive synopsis of the research topic and flow, to prove importance towards an examination question. Following subsections, would detail various aspects of systematic literature review, such as identifying relevant articles using various sources of database, containing, articles, journals etc.

2.1. Scope of The Review:

The Scope of the review is governed under two functions of literature review, namely, outline of the research areas and corresponding interpretations of the data gathered against the literature review topic. Research areas, including, published journals, research articles, and certified knowledge contents, which gave us detailed references into the research topic. Magazine and newspaper articles, books related to general concepts, such as brand management etc., and all other sources which come under the definition of non-academic articles, were excluded from the scope of the review.

In terms of corresponding interpretation from the above researched articles, we kept our analysis centric to concept of alternative brand management method used by Google, for expanding its customer reach and connect, using Google Doodle.

2.2 Identification of Relevant Literature:

Initial phase of identification of relevant data into the research topic faced difficulties, as not much of data was published on the same lines as the branding with Google Doodle, we were centering our research on. To overcome this difficulty, we divided branding based on broader literature aspects, such as branding, people connectivity, culture etc., and corresponding attributes of the same, which Google utilizes to create its brand image through Google Doodle.

In initial database search, we searched for various combinations of keyboard, ‘Google’, ‘Doodle Branding’, ‘Google Doodle’, ‘Digital Marketing and Google’, ‘Culture through Google Doodle’, etc., in various renowned and authentic databases, namely, Emerald, Web of Knowledge, Scopus, Google Scholar. Database selection was based on the authenticity, quality of publications and relevant search parameters, in context with management economics and branding. Our first round of database search yielded us 923 results, in which we found, 390 duplicate publications, which were eliminated from the flow, as shown in the database flow diagram, Fig 1.

Further, 533 Filtered results from the first iteration of search, was taken in for second round of elimination, in which we removed 423 articles, which were not exactly in line with our centric idea of literature review topic, and/or were irrelevant or contrary to the selected area of research.

Table 1: List of Databases and Corresponding areas of matrix used for database search

		First round
Database	Scope and search criteria	Date of search	Number of items
Emerald	Search: Chapters, Case studies and Keywords Document type: Article. Language: English	20/07/2018	22
Web of knowledge	Search: Catalog, Articles, databases, Journals	20/07/2018	250
Scopus	Search: Abstracts, keywords and titles	24/07/2018	41
Google Scholar	Search: Articles/Chapters, Journal. Document type: article. Language: English	24/07/2018	610
Total 923

In the second round of elimination, we faced difficulty in the elimination on the basis of contraries, as the broad elements of the research papers, were not finding the commonalities for further selection. The same issue was resolved, by finding the broad elements of the Google Doodle, and issues used for making brand image of Google Through them. These classifications were namely, Literature, Art, Entertainment, Sports, Economic, Branding and Media, whose chart made against, year of publication can be seen in Fig. 4.

Fig 1: Flow chart, depicting process of elimination and selection of literature from various databases, and number of articles eliminated in two iterations of elimination.

2.3 Systematic Literature Review Results:

All the 110 articles that we have researched and used in this review were published between 2007 to 2018, among these years, research on the Google Doodle Branding have shown an unstable pattern. For initial years 2007-2013 a stable increase in research is shown, which can be understood as doodle initially appeared and was acknowledged by people around 2007, but later due to lack of features and innovations by Google, downfall in the research about this topic was shown. In recent years Google is actively using Doodle for its branding and has gained popularity and therefore an abrupt increase in the number of research can be seen after 2015.

Fig 2. Year wise distribution of publications with relevant context to research topic

3. METHODOLOGICAL REVIEW:

With this Methodological review, we intent to briefly describe the various methods we incorporated, for doing literature review on branding methods of Google, using Google Doodle. In this methodological review, we are explaining the outline of various verticals, which underwent in our literature review, but without going in depth.

In our approach towards, gathering relative information from the various articles and surveys (Trends, 2018), we extracted relative and conclusive data, supporting the idea of branding used by Google Doodle. In one of the work-discussion, two authors, analyzed various case studies conducted on the topic (Showstack, 2012). Interpreted data inferred from the case study session was categorized under the banner of qualitative research (Elali, 2012). To gather data related to effects of demographic variable branding through doodle search hits based on various demographic audience (There's more to a doodle when working for Google, n.d.), other two authors conducted extensive hit data search using Google Trends Tool, which was categorized under quantitative research (Trends, 2018). On subsequent completion of our previous work sessions, we conducted all author study session meet to combine both the research data, qualitative and quantitative, to interpret and analyze collective data (Fig.3), which was categorized under interdenominational methods. In the same session, we collected data from papers, which were in line with our idea of branding (Blunt), and categorized the same under non-empirical research.

Out of total 110 reviewed articles, Non-empirical research percentage amounted to 39.09% (n = 43). At second highest percentage, quantitative research amounted to 28.18% (n = 31), followed by qualitative research amounting to 24.55% (n = 27) and interdenominational methods summing up to 8.18% (n = 9) (Table 2).

Table 2. Reviewed Literature’s classification under various categories and corresponding number of articles

	Number of articles	Percentage
Non-empirical	43	39.09
Quantitative	31	28.18
Qualitative	27	24.55
Interdenominational methods	9	8.18
Total	110	100

Above segmentation of various methods reflect the core direction of our literature review into Google Doodle and Branding, where Google Doodle uses diverse fields (Watts, n.d.) to make new doodles, thrusting the percentage of non-empirical research into various fields, and their relation to Google Doodle. Quantitative data, included actual search hit data from Google, redirected for search query containing Google Doodle (Trends, 2018). Subsequent analysis in second work session and collaborating data from various demographic hit data, we were able to plot and understand the varying trends of high and lows in Google Doodles popularity, or in other words, the level of curiosity Google Doodle was able to create with their Doodles on homepage (Fig. 3). Our analysis of data, initially focused on inception of Google Doodle, followed by different aspects of branding related to Google Doodle, which further led us to investigate and integrate more data on impacts created by Google Doodle on Google. For later part of review cycle, we relied on Google’s Official hit data to collaborate the same against week data, which led to next higher percentage of Qualitative Data. Collaborative data was created using Data visualization technique (Tsai and Wardell, 2006).

Fig 3: Week wise distribution of publications with relevant context to research topic

4. THEMATIC REVIEW:

During our session on case studies and research paper review, we found various categories of theme emerging from the same, and same we have tabulated in Fig. 4.

Fig 4: Various Classification of relevant data used for Google Doodle Branding, as against number of articles included in research paper and year of publication

Even though, the theme is classified under categories, namely, Literature, Art, Entertainment, Games, Economic, Branding and Media, on final consultation with third and fourth author, we found that, Google Doodle, had more inclinations towards only three topics, which are Branding and Media, Literature and Entertainment, and same was discussed further for the thematic review of Google Doodle and Branding.

4.1 Branding and Media:

While doing research for Google Doodle and Branding, the area which was highly impacted in the reviewed literature was Branding and Media (Balakrishnan, Dahnil, and Yi, 2014). Most of the articles emphasized the role played by Doodle in branding of Google and how it provides insights to media marketing strategy. With the help of Doodle, Google is socializing themselves in various areas by introducing prominent personalities with doodles on their birthday and other festive occasions. By focusing and planning according to the different cultures round the World (Vries, Gensler, and Leeflang, 2012), Google is fraternizing across the globe by doodling for festivals, event announcements, games, sports, and other important events. Some researchers have also investigated on how Google Doodle stands different from other media platforms (Tsimonis and Dimitriadis, 2014), how Google Doodle make people engaged by arranging various activities in the form of quiz. Sharing of knowledge about various happenings or personalities that many people might not be aware of. Many people have acknowledged the spontaneous drawings, solving puzzles etc. make them easier to attend things with a better sense of meaning.

Google Doodle also provide perception for social media marketing campaign (Singh and Sonnenburg, 2012), with this campaign Doodle provides a balanced and logical debates along with strong viewpoint. For e.g. Google created a Doodle to check the universal day of ladies. This Doodle outlined Women in Lab coats, Judges' wigs, Astronauts' suits and Chef Hats. Melanie McDonagh felt this Doodle was dis-serving and that individuals ought to be people and not along the lines of sexual orientation. She has a legitimate point and comprehend Google's purpose in commending the accomplishments of ladies. One need to create substance that will influence individuals to banter along shifting yet sensible lines. Many articles also Enlighted the Google Doodle act as a social media platform and creates curiosity among people. With memorable headlines, eloquent intro’s and enthralling images Doodle never failed to make its user curious.

4.2 Entertainment:

Logos are a basic piece of the corporate visual character of associations. By utilizing logo varieties, organizations can confine and tweak the client encounter (Moyer-Gusé, 2008). In this examination, we measure the impact of logo customization on the commitment of clients from various societies. we utilize data about more than 3,000 Google logo varieties – the Google doodles – that kept running on Google's landing page in different nations amid the most recent 20 years. Painstakingly consolidating the doodles' metadata with related online visits information from Wikipedia empowers estimating the client commitment for every one of these doodles. The outcomes demonstrate that Entertainment influences client commitment (Vila-López and Rodríguez‐Molina, 2013). Extra bits of knowledge picked up from this examination identify with the impact of repeating doodle subjects, doodle sexual orientation inclination, and culturally diverse impact (Kraak and Story, 2015). Notwithstanding the outcomes relating to the impact of adjustment on client commitment, this paper additionally presents another interdisciplinary, examination-based philosophy for investigate in the stimulation, Sports, Economic, Literature, Art, Branding and Media fields. The utilization of openly accessible huge information which measures the reaction of clients to a huge number of pictures can furnish specialists with new and important bits of knowledge.

Google is known for celebrating essential dates with Google Doodles, which appear on the internet searcher's page. Relatively every critical day has a Google Doodle, and it likewise includes the birthday celebrations of noticeable individuals from crosswise over history and culture.

4.3 Literature:

Topics related to Literature were the top area of investigation in the review section of Google Doodle. Starting from 2010 till 2018 the Google Doodle has continuously affected by the writers and authors (Whitelock and Fastoso, 2007). Most of these articles were specifically related to the Awareness towards the society, and this seemed to be the only research area in this review where the geographic focus was visible.

Literature from time being long has impacted various strata and issues of our society (Dũng, 2012). Writers have always tried to bring out the basic problems of our society and following their footsteps Google Doodle has also started appreciating them. Google Doodle makes the whole world understand about the impact of the Literature and the power that a writer has. Literature has impacted the diversification of Google Doodle (2011) and made it one of the most favorite advertisement platforms for Google. Google following the, great writers and authors, has expanded itself across the globe.

Google Doodle also following the same pattern. Creating the unique impact on the people Google Doodle is changing the perspective of people demanded using the google. Taking the most recent design of Google Doodle on Mahadevi Varma is celebrating her Jnanpith Award for her outstanding contributions to Indian literature which she received on April 27 in 1982.This change has helped google to attract lot of attention (Kemp, Childers, and Williams, 2012). Following the Different path as compared to his competitor like Yahoo, Internet Explorer these variation with Google Doodle has helped the google to highlight its position among the various countries across the globe.

Writers through their literature highlight the problems and various intangible facts about our day to day life. They have used literature as a mode of their communication towards the society. Google Doodle has followed the path of writers and using them as a tool for its branding. Changing of Google Doodle corresponding to various elite writers and authors has impacted the market at a large scale. Google Doodle is celebrating Gabriel García Márquez, or “Gabo,” as the man once called “the greatest Colombian who ever lived” was affectionately known. Literature has used as a powerful tool by Google Doodle expanding their arena of expertise with growing completion. Literature studies has always been followed since old time and branding of Google using this platform has widened its range to their various hierarchy of society and organizations. Exploring the power of writing and literature Google Doodle has reached at the mind of all people. Being most visible aspect of Google chrome, these Google Doodle has been found impacting for the people working in different countries. Google Doodle connects these at one platform.

5. LIMITATIONS:

We faced certain limitations in our review. Our first barrier was the limited access to reliable data, while conducting a qualitative research; data which we referred were not verified or authenticated. Our whole research was mainly based on the data received from existing research papers. Also, we didn’t have access to surveys conducted by Google which reduced our research data hence creating a major hindrance in finding a trend. Another limitation we realized after completing our interpretation of data that we missed on a few key questions that could have helped us directing the issues more clearly.

Restricted number of research papers on our topic and limited number of authenticated resources. The first limitation is the use of selected keywords. The combination of keywords used was meant to be broad and comprehensive, and the scope of our search included appropriate keywords, titles and abstracts, however some of the relevant literature might have been neglected. Another limitation of this research paper is related to the risk of bias in inclusion and exclusion of articles, bias is nothing but an error or deviation in the results which can lead to underestimation or overestimation of an effect in the study. Risk of bias is the extent to which the design and analysis of the study are likely to have prevented a bias. Despite a methodological flaw, results may be unbiased which is why it is pertinent to consider the risk of bias. Differences in risk of bias can be due to variations in the results and inferences of the studies. However, irrespective of variations in results of validity of studies included, it is import to evaluate the risk of bias in all the studies.

6. DIRECTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH:

Suggestions for future research on Google Doodle and branding usage by people can be made based on the methodological and thematic findings of this review. We are looking for company who want to do collaborate with google. Looking for new opportunities for different companies/startups that can get benefits from Google Doodle. Google Doodle is a strong tool for google research and it is a most alluring platform that google.

Considerations taken for the future research on Google Doodle and branding can be calculated based on methodologies used and thematic research of this review. If we explore in depth of how Google is branding itself through Doodle, how it has involved the all different people and how it has impacted the society, these researches would be very helpful. Further researches must vigorously capture the Google Doodle marketing strategies. There is much more need of qualitative data and practical based research for Google Doodle and branding to get the useful sampling data. In future, research based studies should also apply the research design that will involve continuous observations of the same variables over short or long periods of time.

Thematically observing, there is necessity for future research in all the identified themes, and apart from them many other new fields are also needed to be explored.

In branding and media field, future research can scrutinize how Doodle without any social media platform is gaining popularity among people in terms of media source. One can also analyze how perception of Google Doodle as a media in different regions and cultures of the world, how it is creating awareness among people towards various matters like politics, renowned celebrities, philanthropy (E.g. Yoga day, Blood donation, tree plantation campaign, earth day). In future research we can also consider how Google has to keep updating its branding strategy so that Doodle does not lose it market value, what all different and innovative changes will be required to keep the people’s interest towards Google.

In entertainment field, future researches can be based on the how Google needs to examine the impact it is creating through Doodle and through this analysis how Google is going to distinguish its market as compared to other entertainment websites. Future researches can include the qualitative analysis of how general public gets affect by the creative logos set by Google and how the videos and information associated to the Doodle attracts the attention of the people. If one can get the feedback from people regarding various quiz, puzzle which are part of various Doodle, these feedback can create a good qualitative data for Google Doodle branding research.

In Literature field, future researches can be regarding the how the Google is creating interest and awareness regarding different literature streams like fiction, psychology etc. One can look for the literature inspired people to analyze the impact Google is creating through Doodle. Since studies associated to literature are always followed, it can be the most important area of Google to market its brand. Future researches can also be done on how literature directly associate to people’s mind and how people gets fascinated through a small representation of their favorite literature or author. Additional to these key areas, there are many other areas which can be explored to understand the branding strategies used by Google, for e.g. in areas like Art, Economics, Public affairs, cultures.

7. CONCLUSION:

This literature review on Google Doodle branding, provides an effective understanding of how Google is marketing itself through Doodle. We have applied systematic methodology and have identified 110 articles, we have distributed these articles into 5 major research themes: Literature, Art, Entertainment, Games and Branding and media.

Concerning our methodologies, we realized that there is more requirement for qualitative studies. Also given the changing dynamics of marketing as well as which will build a strong sample data for future research. Another fact is that with frequent changing dynamics of marketing techniques and evolving media technologies, there is necessity to involve research parameters that are adaptive to these changing paradigms. In conclusion, we foresee that research rate on google doodle and branding keeps on improving.

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Received on 08.08.2019 Modified on 14.09.2019

Asian Journal of Management. 2019; 10(4):312-318.

DOI: 10.5958/2321-5763.2019.00046.5