Happy Birthday to you, and us.

Gmail celebrated its 20th year birthday on April 1, 2024. Yay!

Do you remember when you had to be invited to get a Gmail address? It was a stellar marketing idea at the time, to create the aura of a private club.

On the same day, April 1st, 2024, Charcoal Marketing turned eight years old. While I am always drawn to the irony of starting a new company on April Fools’ Day, this year I wanted to make a comparison to Google‘s Gmail and Charcoal Marketing (stay with me for this).

Free email was the offer back then - without the ties to Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, (Bell) Sympatico or Eastlink. Gmail today is so much different than its first iteration. You need a Gmail account to be able to access any of the Google Suite (now Workspace) features. And what a suite it is – collaboration tools, like Google Meet, Chat and Calendar. Productivity tools, like Google Docs, Sheets and Slides and tons of storage in Google Drive. It’s for all shapes and sizes of business.

Charcoal similarly, has expanded its suite of services, starting first as a Web Design and Development firm. We morphed into Inbound Marketing for a time to fuel our clients’ websites, and are now offering a full suite of marketing services (Branding, Content Marketing, SEO, Marketing PR, Media Planning & Buying, and yeah, Web Design and Development). We recently introduced fractional marketing services, where we act as a full marketing team, for small and medium size businesses looking to grow - fast. 

Hopefully you’re getting where I’m going with all this. Am I saying that Charcoal Marketing growth can be compared with Google’s Gmail? C’mon, what April Fool would believe that?