Strategic analysis - Yahoo!!

Résumé du document

The underlying mission of Yahoo is to "connect people to their passions, their communities, and the world's knowledge." To ensure this, Yahoo offers a broad and deep array of products and services to create unique and differentiated user experiences and consumer insights by leveraging connections, data, and user participation.

Yahoo has emerged to be one of the leading search engines on the Web, and enables finding anything on the Internet immediately through its Yahoo Web Search. Its sense of vision is to make an impact on society and empower consumers in all possible ways. It shares a personal responsibility to maintain customers' loyalty and trust.

Yahoo began as part of pursuance of a hobby of two students in 1994. David Filo and Jerry Yang, two Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering, started to put up links of their favorite pages in categories, and classified them into subcategories.

Information about new webpage, which serves for finding useful web sites, was passed on from one person to another, and Yahoo celebrated its first million-hit day within half a year after its foundation. David and Jerry understood that there is a huge potential and later they hired competent people to be a part of its management.

Presently, Yahoo is a leading global Internet communications, commerce and media organization that offers a comprehensive branded network of services to more than 345 million individuals each month worldwide.

Communication
As an organization, Yahoo has launched several ad campaigns. Every campaign had a different purpose but used the same communication channels. All the examples about Yahoo communication have taken place only in United States of America where Yahoo was founded. They have used several advertising campaigns in the society and have also sponsored some events. The following are some examples:
•"In 2006, Yahoo kicked off its advertising campaign when it aired its first series of commercials during the Academy Awards on March 23. The commercial spot, dubbed "Big Night," profiled Yahoo Personals users prepping for their dates, such as a cowboy dusting off his hat and a septuagenarian doing a jig in a leisure suit. It launched a promotional blitz for its online personals that will run on television, radio, billboards and the Net".
The objective of the campaign is as follows: "online personals have become a growing business on the Web mainly because people will pay for it. This has sparked competition among major players such as Match.com, Yahoo, Date.com, Matchmaker, Kiss.com and Lavalife. "

Extraits

[...] Mainly they have used several advertising campaigns in society and also sponsored some events. For example: year 2006 Yahoo will kick off its advertising campaign when it airs its first series of commercials during the Academy Awards on March 23. The commercial spot, dubbed "Big Night," will profile Yahoo Personals users prepping for their dates, such as a cowboy dusting off his hat and a septuagenarian doing a jig in a leisure suit. It will launch a promotional blitz for its online personals that will run on television, radio, billboards and the The reason of the campaign is because “online personals have become a growing business on the Web mainly because people will pay for it. [...]

[...] Meanwhile 15 respondents are not using Yahoo. On the question about satisfaction of products and services provided by Yahoo 9respondents answered that they are satisfied with services of Yahoo persons out of 20 are rather satisfied persons rather not satisfied and 2 respondents not satisfied with services of Yahoo. On the question about using users feed-back service in Yahoo major part of respondents 16 persons out of 20 have never used users feed- back in Yahoo and only 4 respondents answered that they have used it Gap analysis After summarizing the results of our questionnaires we recognized two knowledge gaps and one attitude gap which shows that the Corporate Identity of Yahoo does not match with people's perception of Yahoo Lack of knowledge about latest innovations of Yahoo respondents out of 35 did not recognize any of the latest innovations of Yahoo. [...]

[...] Results showed that there is attitude gap. Major part of respondents associated only 4 values with Yahoo Funny, Innovative, Fast-growing Company and Serious. There is still five values people do not associate with Yahoo and that leads to an attitude gap. Communication objectives 1. By the end of August of the people who did not recognize the latest innovations of Yahoo should know that there is possible to download podcasts about different issues including latest innovations and 21% of our target group would use them By the march 2009 at least 42% of our target group should be able to mention at least one sponsorship of Yahoo in The Netherlands By the end of year of our target group should associate Yahoo with at least 3 of 4 rarely mentioned Yahoo's values inner communication, good working conditions, ethical and loyal. [...]

[...] With the donations image will be improved and people will associate yahoo with an ethic behavior. Sponsoring instruments Summarizing our sponsoring instruments which we would use to close above mentioned gaps: Programs, more specific podcasts from Yahoo Celebrity endorsement, more specific Dutch or world-known celebrity, Dutch football team Ajax Events, more specific opening day for Yahoo organization in The Netherlands Charity, more specific 0,07% donations for 3rd world countries of Yahoo's incomes Website, more specific information on the Yahoo homepage about users feedback Implementation and planning The sponsoring activities will cost to Yahoo: Podcasts: Yahoo creating its own podcast will cost about 9.000 euros the first month and next months 5.000 euros per month. [...]

[...] Do you know at least one sponsorship of Yahoo? Respondent's associations with Yahoo regarding to their main values. If after the questionnaire we find that communication objectives are achieved we can say that sponsoring strategy was successful. If after the questionnaire we find that communication objectives are not achieved at all or very less we have to improve our sponsoring strategy and instruments or we have to change our communication objectives. http://money.cnn.com/2007/02/01/technology/pluggedin_lashinsky_yahoo.fortune /index.htm http://docs.yahoo.com/info/values/ http://docs.yahoo.com/info/misc/history.html http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060918-083404 http://www.news.com/2100-1024-992422.html Allen Olivio, Yahoo's VP of global brand marketing, told ClickZ. [...]