Making of Big Brand Yahoo!

Yahoo! Has positioned itself as the common man’s home on Internet.
– Phill Carpenter

January 1994, Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo created a website named “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web. Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web was a directory of other web sites, organized in a hierchary, as opposed to a searchable index of pages. In April 1994, “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” was renamed “Yahoo!”. By the end of 1994, Yahoo! had already received one million hits. Yang and Filo realized their website had massive business potential, and on 2 March 1995, Yahoo! was incorporated

California base Yahoo! has emerged as the world’s leading Internet portal. Yahoo! has been the first company to setup an online navigation guide on Internet. It offered media content, communication, personalized information and commerce service on the web site www.yahoo.com. Yahoo! generated revenue mainly through advertisements, promotions, sponsorships, direct advertising and merchandising.

Yahoo! has kept close tab on the evolution of the market and the interest of the customers, and has cultivated a reputation of excellence, from its convenient and logical display of information, and excellent customer service. moreover, convenience has been core of Yahoo!’s success. The user-friendly way of structured information has helped Yahoo! gain customer trust viz. feature My Yahoo! allows surfer to customize their view of Yahoo! by tailoring the information to users preferences. The special feature has increased customer comfort and convenience,

Branding

We’ve setout to make Yahoo! the only place anyone needs to go to get connected to anything. There’s nothing in the real world to compare to that.
– Timothy Koogle

Yahoo! had attempted to build a strong brand on the net. As Yahoo! believed in the fact which is also advocated by Reid in Architect of the web “if you are the brand name people know, (your site) is where they are going to go first .” Yahoo! acted early and quickly to get to know the customers specific need and responded very fast to their requirement in form of high quality service at no cost to the end user.

Yahoo! projected an image of a brand which can speak of anybody. It has also avoided characterizing itself as a technology oriented company. Since beginning it portrayed the image of human face, conveying the brand personality that is accessible, helpful, and fun-loving.

An important aspect of Yahoo!’s brand building effort was advertising and public relation. Since inception, firm has invested substantially in public relation. It helped Yahoo! boost awareness at very low cost. Venture capitalist, Mike Mortz, pointed out the value of public relatin to Yahoo!, which is followed religiously. The PR agency Niehaus Ryan Wong (NRW) helped it become a household name. NRW used the cofounder celebrity status to personify Yahoo! as a really youthful, interesting and user-friendly in service. The strategy worked well and it was regularly covered in Smart Money, Rolling Stone, Advertising Week, Advertising Age, brand Week to name a few.

In 1996 the company hired ad agency the Black Rocket to create an ad campaign that would build an awareness created by company’s IPO. The campaign projected Yahoo! as a consumer brand. In comparison with the brick and mortar companies like P&G, which had taken 25 years Yahoo! created equally strong brand in less than five years. Yahoo! was the first to major web player to tune to television. In late 1996, Yahoo!’s “gone finish” ad, aired on television became very popular. I January 1999 Yahoo! tied up with News Corp, to launch a marketing campaign in TV and the Internet. Yahoo! came out with TV ads before the start and end of the popular super Bowl tournament. Yahoo! also sponsored TV shows which were aired immediately after super Bowl.

As the first online navigational guide on the web, Yahoo! is a leading guide in terms of traffic, advertising, household and business user reach. Yahoo! invested in feature such as free e-mail, and Yahoo! messenger who encouraged he user come back to Yahoo! regularly.

Conclusion

Yahoo! is one of the most successful brands on Internet. It was first to market with a detailed search engine, first to go public, first to turnaround annual profit, first to go mainstream advertising. To maintain the lead Yahoo! focused on creation of a high quality end-to-end customer experience. In addition, their innovative promotional and guerrilla marketing techniques, have created a distinct brand identity that differentiate the brand and appeals to the target market.