Strategic analysis - Yahoo case study

Abstract

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. "