My earlier post concerning the waning fortunes of Yahoo! and, to a lesser extent, Ebay, made me consider the nature of brand loyalty. I say this because, in seeing the Economist claim that “Yahoo! lives, but on the web’s equivalent of life support,” I felt deeply bothered. The more I thought about the article the more uneasy I became. As inconvenient and old as Yahoo! has become compared to Google and other nascent internet companies, I return to, I gravitate toward that cluttered homepage that said article unflatteringly describes as a “tawdry strip mall.”Yahoo! is special and important in a way that can never be replicated by any other internet company. It gave me my first experience with a search engine, my first glimpse of a website back in sweet 1997 when my dad brought home our first clunky PC with Windows 95 and spent hours roaming the World Wide Web. I love Yahoo!’s dense little portal. I defer to its movies section for reviews and its news section for my morning reading. When it started to lose ground to Google and was no longer the search engine of choice among my schoolmates, I committed to being a martyr for Yahoo! – using it exclusively even though it offered fewer results, until my internet browser started offering a Google search box and I sold out. Out of some irrational guilt I have returned to using Yahoo! in the wake of its recent controversies.The truth is, I’ve started to romanticize Yahoo!, to see it as some sad Byronic hero of entepreneurship legend – sometimes loving and agreeable, often disappointing and frustrating. Its much-criticized rejection of Microsoft’s offer, the uncertain future of its CEO and its inevitable consumption by a larger company – it is already putting up Google ads – simply make it more endearing to me. As ridiculous as it sounds, to me Yahoo! is the indie to Google’s mainstream. It is the tragic figure that makes too many mistakes, that helplessly dooms itself by misunderstanding the situation and that ultimately dies beautifully. With some thick moral lesson thrown in for good measure. Dare I say I am a little in love with Yahoo!?Does anyone else have a similar attachment to a company? One that goes beyond preference for a presumably better product? One that is somehow bound to comfort, innocence and all the niceties of childhood, even though the company is as large and impersonal as can be? How do you establish a company that captures that sort of loyalty, that depth of emotional investment?Brand loyalty is the holy grail of marketing, and yet creating it in consumers is still impossibly difficult for many companies. Being the first to offer a service helps, of course, but it is more than that.As entrepreneurs for whom it matters, let us consider this question: is brand loyalty simply incidental – the fortuitous intersection of innovation and cultural circumstance, or can it be manufactured anytime and kept alive in the long term?

Tags: ebay, entrepreneurship, yahoo

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 at 2:37 pm and is filed under Challenges, Innovators, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.