Revamped Yahoo Ready for Market Battle

The famous Yahoo, once the number one search engine, presented itself to the public last week in a new guise. Given that the company operates in an extremely fast and competitive environment, the redesign of the logo was more or less expected, but the realization and presentation prompted industry experts to wonder whether Yahoo’s leadership has finally decided to don the boxing gloves and step into the ring with Google, their dominant opponent.

Namely, more than the announcement of the logo redesign, the virtual users were intrigued by the ‘Thirty-Day Challenge’, during which the company released a new version of the logo every day, which users could then comment on, rate, and share their critiques and suggestions. The final design, presented on the thirtieth day of the challenge, is reportedly the result of the vision of CEO Marissa Mayer’s team and the proposals of the virtual community or, as Yahoo’s vice president Bob Stohrer described it to AdAge reporters, ‘we got a sophisticated logo with a twist.’

With a ‘twist’ or not, the logo itself, crafted in 3D format, in a characteristic pink-purple color and with an exclamation mark at the end, left experts rather indifferent, but despite that, they agree that the marketing team did a great job. During those months, they finally managed to draw media and public attention to Yahoo’s work, instead of the overwhelmingly dominant Google.

Dragon Lady

The clash between the two internet brands peaked in 2011 when Yahoo began to seriously lag behind Google in business results and visitor numbers. Changes in business policy were a dire necessity, so the management decided to shift the focus from expanding online content to developing web technologies and new products. By selling its stake in the Chinese company Alibaba and acquiring Tumblr.com, which has 300 million users with a daily growth of 120,000, Yahoo concluded last autumn with a net profit of $3.2 billion, which was a meager indicator of the company’s recovery by two percent. Research company ComScore states that Yahoo achieved great results through acquisitions (a total of 19), but that the credit goes to a person who came directly from the competition – Google, the aforementioned dragon lady Marissa Mayer.

This skilled and ambitious manager took the helm of Yahoo in the summer of last year and seriously set about reorganizing the company. In addition to making some strategic moves, she decided to reorganize the company at its micro level. For example, she decided to return all her employees who were working from their warm homes back to office desks, as she believed that employees could not perform their jobs as effectively from home as they do in the office. She refreshed the creative team and decided to pay special attention to the company’s marketing, which, according to industry opinion, had become outdated and uninventive.

Facts Over Intuition

Refreshing the visual identity sounded like a very logical first move. Instead of launching it in the classic way, she decided to democratize the process, encouraging the online community to talk about it in as positive a way as possible, and she succeeded in that. Some media, such as Fast Company, declared this method excellent if you want to avoid the responsibility of decision-making; to avoid choosing the wrong one from a series of proposed design solutions, she decided to test the best among users. This ‘risk-averse’ and meticulous approach should not be surprising given that it has long been rumored in Silicon Valley that Mayer insisted at her former company Google that greater attention be paid to interface design and that even the choice of colors must be backed by numbers, research, rather than justified by a designer’s sense of shading.

For example, Google once used one shade of blue on its homepage and another on Gmail. To discover which shade was more effective, she decided to test an incredible 41 shades of blue and ultimately decided to use the one that was ‘neither too green nor too red.’ In the case of the Yahoo brand, the testing was not done by her team but by the entire virtual community whose eyes were fixed on the new logo that was presented every day. In the end, Mayer also spoke out and shared with users the process of creating the final logo, which is a hybrid of user desires and her brand vision. As she says, ‘we knew we wanted a logo that reflects what Yahoo is – unpredictable, yet sophisticated. Modern, fresh, but with an emphasis on our history. It should have a human touch, be personal. Proud.’

Entertainment for the People

In addition to successfully stretching the launch of the new logo over a month in a relatively painless and inexpensive way, Yahoo also managed to confirm the thesis that new winds are blowing in the design profession. Namely, in these new times of augmented reality, it is possible to practically release hundreds of ideas in one day and test them in just a few hours. This significantly changes the decision-making process about whether this or that design solution is better, the intuitive moment loses weight, and it is quickly replaced by ‘amen-ing’ based on concrete data (e.g., this solution appealed to that number of users from this and that target group).

Therefore, regardless of the divided opinions on the appearance of the new logo, the fact remains that Mayer and Co. managed to present users with a new era of brand business in a very elegant and unobtrusive way, without a grand multimillion-dollar campaign. Mayer paid attention to the legacy (the logo did not undergo a dramatic redesign), but again, she infused some sophistication, a touch of modernity into a company nearly two decades old (which is indeed a long time in the internet world).

Or, as Fast Company writes, the Yahoo team showed that a redesign, which is usually carried out more or less routinely, can become a very fun thing for users.