How strong is the Yahoo! brand? According to the “100 Best Global Brands” 2009 rankings by BusinessWeek and brand consultancy firm Interbrand, Yahoo! nets 64th place, way behind Microsoft, which stayed on the 3rd spot, and Google, which climbed from 10th to 7th spot. Interbrand says Yahoo!’s “brand value” slipped 7 percent to $5.1 billion this year, and while partnering with Microsoft Bing “looks like a move in the right direction,” it needs to up its game and “provide consumers with a compelling case as to why it is relevant.”
Yahoo! appears to be doing just that. It recently announced a USD $100 million marketing campaign, which starts September 28 in the US, and runs for 15 months in the country and internationally. Playing on the "Y" in its name, the company’s new tagline is “It’s You!” Says CMO Elisa Steele: “Our vision is to be at the center of people’s online lives — to be at the place where their world meets the larger world.”
In a press release, the company highlighted recent product enhancements that support this new vision, such as revamping its homepage so users can access their favorite sites from a single screen. Connecting to Facebook or Twitter from Yahoo!, for example, allows users to see updates without leaving Yahoo!’s homepage. There’s also streamlined photo sharing and editing on Yahoo! Mail, high-quality “video calling” on Yahoo! Messenger, enhanced search functions, and a mobile homepage with various apps that let users access Yahoo! features on their mobile devices.
Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz, eWeek.com reports, also suggested that the branding campaign could ultimately bring in more ad revenues. “Advertisers follow consumers, and if you want to talk in sort of parlance of advertising, you always need to build circulation. By having more and more engaged users around the world, we’re building circulation,” Bartz said. “By doing this very personalized approach, [we] get really good micro-insights for our advertisers. Consumers want good advertising, that’s meaningful to them, and advertisers want to deliver that.”
But can Yahoo! really pull it off — not only in terms of growing its user base aggressively, but also in keeping them loyal to the site? Results from Web analytics firm Compete shows Yahoo! as the 2nd most visited site, right after Google, and before third placer Facebook. Facebook, however, is growing at a much faster pace (197 percent year-over-year as of August) than either Yahoo! (9 percent) or Google (13 percent). Plus, as Wired Magazine notes, users behave differently on Facebook than anywhere else online — using their real names, connecting with their real friends, sharing their “likes,” thoughts, news, links, etc. This is something that Google and Yahoo! lack for now.
Certainly, Yahoo!’s expensive ad campaign is a step toward increasing awareness of its brand and value, but the competition to dominate online experiences will likely require so much more from the company. “To close the gap between the campaign rhetoric and what they have, (Yahoo! will) have to step up in certain areas and deliver some best-in-class products," analyst Greg Sterling of consulting and research firm Sterling Market Intelligence tells PCWorld. "The campaign itself won't do much if Yahoo can't back up its promise with the actual experience."
Bartz is confident that Yahoo! can deliver on its promise, telling reporters and marketers at the IAB MIXX conference during New York’s Advertising Week that the company will let go of any products or units not aligned with its new vision. But will all these efforts be enough to get “you” to stick to Yahoo!? We’ll have to wait and see.
