Yahoo: Why brand and product need each other more than ever
Yahoo and Alibaba are breaking up.
Last week, Yahoo, that one-time Internet leader that continues to embody the one-stop-shop approach to navigating the internet, announced that it would be splitting itself up, separating its stake in China's Alibaba from its core business.
This is expected to benefit shareholders by giving them unfettered access to Alibaba's success, while allowing them to dump the remaining Yahoo portion of the stock. The fact that the markets think this is a good idea highlights just how much they question Yahoo's ability to pull off the turn around that CEO, Marissa Mayer and her team have long promised.
Great. So, what does this have to do with brands?
Everything.
Yahoo’s failure to establish a clear promise to users, one which it can actually deliver on, highlights the need for companies to anchor brand in the reality of their products.
Yahoo’s failure to establish a clear promise to users, one which it can actually deliver on, highlights the need for companies to anchor brand in the reality of their products. Now, there’s nothing wrong with saying that a brand has an emotional territory that it will occupy or that product managers have an obligation to deliver on what the brand promises. In fact, a consistent emotional stance can be key for helping set expectations amongst consumers. Patagonia combines a sense of the outdoors and adventure with products that help get people out into nature. When you think of BMW’s Mini brand, you’re meant to think fun, optimistic, and, perhaps, a little bit mischievous. Then, when you sit down and press the Start button, a Mini growls to life, and zips along from Point A to Point B. In other words, both Mini and Patagonia build a connection between their promises, and their products.
If one looks at the most admired, most valued and most effective brands today, they all create this link, using brand as not just a thing to drive marketing, but as something that supports the business. It seems basic, but it’s commonly ignored in practice. When brand becomes as a holistic driver of user experience, we can see three stages of the journey where brand comes into play.
Brands can have an impact across all phases of the user experience cycle
A well-oiled experience cycle can lead to loyalty
and success.
A well-oiled experience cycle can lead to loyalty and success. Those brands that understand this are the ones that sacrifice short-term gains for long-term success. REI’s Black Friday #OptOutside effort is a perfect example of this, shutting their doors on the busiest shopping day of the year to get their associates and customers into the places that matter most to them. The fact that retail associates at REI are some of the most die-hard, experienced outdoors adventurers you’ll find is not an accident. Apple gets this with its focus on retail store design, from greeting to mobile check out.
And Yahoo? Not so much.
For companies like Yahoo, brand is something that get’s stuck on an ad, on a product icon, on a sign. It lives and dies in the anticipated experience. Any alignment between it and the actual product experience is pure coincidence. The brand, for all the promises of 2013’s highly-touted “redesign”, wasn't backed up by the product experience. When users showed up, they found that little had actually changed. Wall Street gets this, hence the stock’s poor performance. For a business whose revenue is predicated on advertising, not being able to get users to show up is a big problem.
Now, I’m not suggesting that brand can save Yahoo. Quite the opposite. If Yahoo has had one thing going for it, it’s been the brand. Today, however, the only thing that can save the brand, is a better product experience. Finding that link between product and brand is crucial if Yahoo is to find a path forward that doesn’t include selling off all the useful assets, brand included. But, given how the company has behaved historically, I’m guessing that won’t be the case.
The lesson: Companies that want to create long-lasting relationships with users need to back up their promises across the entire customer journey.
Companies that want to create long-lasting relationships with users need to create more than promises to drive clever, funny, interesting ads. More than building new identities that generate a bit of buzz within the design community. They need to back it up at every point in the customer journey, to be zealots of their promise and advocates of their customers.
If they don’t, well, they’ll become Yahoo.