Yahoo's Big Problem? Bartz Just Wants To Be Loved
Do you know anyone who doesn't want to be loved? Me neither, and high tech executives are no different. In the case of Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz, it takes a particularly corporate slant. She wants her company to be the center of consumers' online lives, and will push the concept with a new marketing campaign. There's just one catch: The strategy will continue to blind the company to its problems, weaken Yahoo's place in the market, and erode competitive position.
Yahoo plans to spend between $75 million and $85 million in a drive to convince consumers to make the company's site their home page. How effective will the effort be? This ia part of the $100 million rebranding campaign that started last fall. So how has the previous spending gone with the first part that seemed more intent on convincing employees of the company's own worth than of changing the minds of consumers? Traffic dropped and high-profile executives took off. So what's the problem with flushing rest of the budget down the drain? And, if the example available on the Internet is any portent of what else is to come, down the drain is exactly where this campaign spending will also go.
Forget, for a moment, the off-putting nature of creepy visuals, as icons march, like so many virtual zombies, to engulf the viewer. Forget that the tagline "It's You" receives little support when those zombie icons mass to form the face of someone else. (Yahoo might as well change the tag to "It's her" for the run of the commercial.) Once again, Yahoo makes the critical mistake of being more interested in its own welfare than that of customers.This is the same mistake that was obvious last summer. As I wrote then:
The essential problem of running a company has been known since at least the time of Plato. There is a constant tug between the desire to make money -- something for us -- and, hopefully, the desire to do the job well -- something for them. This is never a completely harmonious state of affairs, but I think you could reasonably argue that any great company must, on the whole, lean toward something for them, otherwise known as the customers. It's true for an Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG) -- even an IBM or Microsoft (MSFT). The moment the focus tips too much toward you, all those customers start waiting for another opportunity.The line that Bartz used at the time, "We established a clear, simple vision to be the center of people's lives online," could have been written for this campaign:
Today we are excited to preview the next phase of the Yahoo! marketing campaign, showcasing the amazing content and experiences people can find only with Yahoo!. We want people to experience first-hand how Yahoo! is the place where all the things, people, experiences, information -â€" everything you care about â€"- come together. It's a place that gets to know you, a place that surprises you. And we'll demonstrate it by letting you sample the products, see them in action and have experiential encounters.This is actually a perversion of the concept of putting the customer first. It's like the acquaintance who starts a conversation with you, only to suddenly say, "But enough of you; let's talk about me." The focus pretends to be on what consumers can do, but it's really about how you should do what you want at Yahoo. The difference is subtle, but important. It also comes out in the most ridiculous ways. As Kara Swisher points out on All Things Digital, the commercial's indirect-but-obvious whack at Google becomes inane:
And now it's here -- and, in part, it's an odd attempt to mock the simple and elegant white box that allowed Google (GOOG) to steal Yahoo's thunder many years back, as well as lightning and any other weather system worth owning. "There's nothing to look at but a box and a button," says the voice-over in the Yahoo (YHOO) commercial -- which you can see below -- about an unnamed, but obvious, Web site. "When you look at this homepage nothing looks back at you. You come to this place so you can leave."Yes, it is, and through this approach, Yahoo underscores how little it understands, or even cares about, its users. People can smell insincerity, and I doubt that the new campaign will do Yahoo any more good than the last one.Well, yes! Because it's a search page!
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