Blog Yes & Know

The jury is still out. There are those who believe Yahoo has lost the clarity of vision needed to complete with a juggernaut like Google, and an increasingly hungry Microsoft. They’re convinced Yahoo has lost the pulse of its community. Other observers believe Yahoo can recover from its recent stumbles, if it recaptures the cachet it once had.
Let’s quickly review some of the facts. Yahoo is battling slowing sales growth, a slumping stock price and a steady stream of executive departures. In spite of these troubles, it is still the dominant player on most of the web. Yahoo is the most visited website on the Internet today with more than 412 million unique users. Since November, 2006, it’s been battling MySpace for the title “Top US Visited Website.”

At the most recent meeting of the American Marketing Association, Ad Age reports, “The speakers at the podium kept changing, but their words remained the same. One after the other, the marketing world leaders took to the stage and declared that it’s time to give up control and accept that consumers now control their brands.”
Of course, in some ways, they always have. A brand has always only been as good as a consumers’ experience of it. The difference today is that consumers have lots of ways of communicating those experiences and trust each other’s views instead of marketers’ overt sales pitches. A more interactive environment gave them the tools to be better informed and less susceptible to the traditional one-way communication model. Consequently, they are influencing marketing strategies as never before.