Google Local

Our brief was to come up with an idea to help a local business not only survive the COVID-19 pandemic, but thrive. Instead of picking just one business, we wanted to come up with a solution that would help as many businesses as possible. So we leaned into two key insights: people overwhelmingly prefer to shop local (regardless of an increase in cost or inconvenience) and most people search online before making a purchase. We found that over 69% of smartphone owners use their devices to help them shop and “near me” searches on mobile have grown over 150% in the last two years.

Our idea, Google Local uses the world’s most popular search engine to help save small and local businesses. It makes it easy for people to filter out small businesses when searching on Google Maps and Google Shopping. To advertise our idea, we’ll leverage the Google platform and lean into the idea of “local.” On launch day, we’ll use a special Google doodle to show people how to use the new feature. For digital, we’ll put a face to local businesses. And for out-of-home, we’ll remind people of all the local businesses near them.

Google Local helps people search local, so we can save local.