Every year, Google do jokes on April 1st known for being April Fool’s Day. This year, Google did 2 jokes or at least I heard about two of them. The first one concerns Gmail Motion and the second one concern the Auto-completer job at Google.

Google announced its new product: Gmail Motion. Considering the mouse and the keyboard as being obsolete tools, Google released a new version of Gmail called Gmail Motion where you use your body instead of the mouse and keyboard. Here is the video they uploaded on YouTube:

In addition to that, Google did a video in which a guy promote his job as a “Google Auto-completer”. His job is to auto-complete the words users type in the Google search bar. It’s not easy to explain it in words so just check the video:

Those jokes are surely funny but they are costly in time and money: It needs people to spend time on creating a good idea for a joke, find a good way to represent it and promote it to the public and all this is not free of charge. So why Google does that ? I think it’s a kind of marketing strategy. This may help a company promote its reputation or a product or a service it’s offering etc…

First, those jokes gives an image to Google as being a creative company with a lot of ideas. This is really good for them and for their competitive strategy because they are in a n industry where it is all about creativity. Second, those jokes can promote the Gmail service of Google and it can promote the Google Jobs page too. Even though you know it’s a joke you will go on gmail.com/motion or google.com/jobs just by curiosity. Google is using April fool’s jokes as a tool to promote the image of the company and the services they offer.

I may be wrong but, this is my personal point of view. If you have another idea or would like to add anything don’t hesitate to post a comment on this post !