GOOGLE.

For a little-known artist, Dennis Hwang has a gigantic audience. That's because the 27-year-old webmaster moonlights as the Google doodler. From Googleplex, the company's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., he creates the art that intermittently hugs the company's logo on its homepage. His quirky sketches--celebrating events as obvious as Christmas and as random as Claude Monet's birthday--are quintessential Google.

Most companies are shy about fiddling with their logos, but any company that named itself Google is not too worried about the rules. In fact, Google has built itself into a blockbuster while shunning conventional brand-building. "Google does not participate in traditional marketing activities," says spokeswoman Eileen Rodriguez.

Google believes that in the online world, branding is mostly about the experience. Build a product that is great to use, and a great brand will follow. It's a philosophy that might give marketing pros the shivers, but it complements Google's stated mission: "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." By focusing its resources primarily on building and constantly upgrading its technology--it recently added a blog search tool--Google has become the search engine of choice. It "became a verb for a very good reason," says UBS analyst Ben Schachter. "It was that much better than the competition."

Google also offered something its competitors didn't: simplicity. While other search engines and portals cluttered their home pages with horoscopes and stock charts, Google kept its website tidy. Google focused on search and only search, and its innovative search technology, listing websites in order of hits, was a key to making it the market leader. Then it devised an advertising business model that drove revenues in its direction. As the company grows, so does its ambitions. The zillion-dollar question is, Can it successfully shed its one-service image?

But remember that even the Google doodler was questioned early on. Skeptics told company leaders, "You can't put sketches in the logo, because it screws up the brand," says John Battelle, author of The Search, a new book on the company. In true Google fashion, they did it anyway. And it worked.