»lagtime.com »[ caught |n between ] noteblog »Meet the new Yahoo! It's the same as the old Yahoo! »updated 2013-09-05; 04:51:46 PM

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• « Thursday « September 5, 2013

  1. datetime

     1. {09052013}
     2. {04:51:46 PM}

     content

     1. Meet the new Yahoo! It's the same as the old Yahoo!

         

        (www.lagtime.com/cib/)

         

     2. ...well, kinda, sorta.

        

        Typography pundits and colorists will bloviate over the pluses and minuses of clown fonts, serifs versus scallops, Pantone Violet C, and what is actually achieved by tilting the exclamation point in "Yahoo!" exactly 9 degrees, and not 9 + pi degrees, or 42 degrees. Some pundits even say, the Yahoo! mark has grown up. Feel free to debate. But to most people—like you and me—the new Yahoo! mark doesn't herald some momentous sea-change.

        And I think that's point of this entire exercise: it's not about change to us, the outsiders, it's about change for them: the people inside of Yahoo!

        The thing about branding is there's at least two stories of the brand. First, the outside story, where the brand signals to the marketplace how they're different, and why they're better than the competition. All of the things you associate with branding—design, color, fonts and typography, packaging, naming, labeling and nomenclature, brand architecture—those are the signals that help evoke the essence of the brand in the marketplace. That's what people think they're talking about when the say "branding."

        But there's also the inside story: the story that takes place behind the walls of the ivory tower. Where the leaders get all of their employees to buy into the vision, drink the Kool Aid, and dare I say, live the brand. We call it internal branding, and it's a critical piece of brand experience, and a key to the ultimate success or failure of a brand. To me this entire Yahoo! 30 Days of Change campaign schtick was mostly about CEO Marissa Meyer signalling to her troops how the new Yahoo!—her Yahoo!—is going to go to market, from the inside-out, right down to the degrees of gangsta lean in their purple exclamation point.

        In the classic business book, Good to Great, the authors state unequivocally that in order for a company (or a brand) to be great—as Yahoo! once was—the captain of the ship has got to get the right people on the boat, and then get them to accept the direction in which said leader wishes to sail.

        In little over a year, in numerous ways, Meyer has started to get the right people on her boat, and has started making employees more accountable for their actions and responsibilities. Another key piece in her turnaround strategy has been getting the employees to believe in her vision and in where she wants to take them.

        How can she do that? Well, one way would be to concoct a widely publicized campaign to change the company logo—not by going to experts (aside, this DIY vibe is something that absolutely scares firms like my employer to death) but by working in-house. Sure, a bit of transparency is shown to the outside world in this process, but it's just an attention-getting tease. This campaign nets a new identity that is semantically different than the one that proceeded it (and again, I'll let the typography wonks battle it out on the aesthetics and color). But inside, the process included employee opinion and participation, and was hand-crafted by employees. It was a process that reveals to the Yahoo! rank-and-file what matters to their leader: thoughtfulness (to the extreme perhaps), precision, and just a dash of uber-geeky whimsy, 9 degrees to be exact.

        As personal trainers, and life coaches will tell you: real change starts on the inside. And this was an inside job.

        Who knows it may just work. It just may energize a sleeping giant.

        Last month, for the first time in almost two years, Yahoo! beat Google for the top spot in global Web traffic.

        Yahooooooooooooo! say the stockholders.

        
        

        Yahoo! logo courtesy of Yahoo!, Inc. Permission being requested.

     metadata

     1. 
     2. 04:51:46 PM

     3. ...well, kinda, sorta.

        ..."
     4. 

     categories

     1. keywords:
     2. business
     3. internet
     4. tags:
     5. web
     6. yahoo
     7. search
     8. marissameyer

     type

   

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