Watch out, the waves of the Net are about to splash right off computer monitors and onto the chests of mallrats across the country. Not content to offer mere information to confused netizens, Internet directory magnate Yahoo has announced a plan that it hopes will build both individual identity and a sense of community among the company's fans.
Get out your checkbook, and say hello to the Nike of cyberspace. Or is that Sega? Yahoo has enlisted Sega of America, rather than a conventional marketeer, to flood the meatspace marketplace with products emblazoned with the Yahoo logo.
Nightgowns, T-shirts, coffee mugs - and skateboards, of course - will offer such thought-provoking messages as: "Do You Yahoo?" and "See the World in One Magic Hour." In short, said Karen Edwards, director of brand management for Yahoo, these are "products that really help support a very high-quality image."
But don't expect much in the way of product relevance in the new goods, due to hit the malls next year. Yahoo is "trying to sell merchandise that is fun and interesting - and maybe sometimes related somehow to the Internet and computing," Edwards said. It's not about the service, but branding the Yahoo name - to people who haven't yet met the Net.
"If we can be successful at promoting our brand as an icon of popular culture and that makes it easier for people to discover the Web and easier for people to understand us as the place to start on the Internet, then that helps people feel a lot more comfortable with technology in the first place," Edwards explained.
Sega is a strange but nice fit for the plan. The videogame-maker will get a percentage on the goods sold, and can leverage its own mammoth marketing efforts to get the Yahoo name before massive numbers of eyeballs. Yahoo was apparently charmed by Sega's own brand marketing efforts, which include Sonic the Hedgehog Spaghetti-Os and plush dolls.
"Sega is so very entrenched with the 13- to 17-year-old males; Yahoo is probably looking at the right audience there," said Lise Buyer, an analyst at Deutsche Morgan Grenfell. She gave a thumbs-up to the marketing deal, adding that "with all of these companies, particularly those with strong brand names, the key is partnership with as many different organizations and different distribution channels as possible."
Yahoo's choice of Sega was due in large part to the Japanese gamemaker's expertise in branding tech products. "There aren't a lot of people who understand what the Internet is," explained Edwards. "We weren't looking for people are going to say, 'Surf the big waves with Yahoo.' With some of the other licensing agents we considered, we saw some things that were pretty cheesy like that: surfing metaphors that were kinda three-years-ago stuff."
Edwards apparently snoozed during that part of Sega's pitch. Cynthia Wilkes, director of licensing at Sega of America, is all jazzed up about her company's creative contribution to Yahoo's marketing push, including products emblazoned "with a surfboard metaphor, that says underneath it, 'Yahoo - Surf the Net.'"
Nonetheless, Sega believes that it's hip to the message Yahoo seeks to promulgate. "There's a demand out there for people to say, 'I'm part of this growth, this area, this community of the '90s,'" said Wilkes.
Although some might interpret Yahoo's efforts as a marketing ploy, Wilkes dismisses such nay-sayers as short-sighted. "It's not being used as an advertising vehicle at all," insisted Wilkes. "People love to have things and wear things and display things that say something about who they are - and I think that says something about who they are, just like other brands."
While Yahoo's foray into sportswear and the like is likely to borrow from Sega's success at making Sonic the Hedgehog ubiquitous in the lunch-box market, Yahoo's self-infatuation is apparently rooted in its own ranks. Five staffers have covered their cars with Yahoo logos, Edwards said. Another splayed the company name on his boat. But the one who wins the company loyalty award must be the guy who Edwards reported has "Yahoo!" tattooed on his butt. Now if that's not branding....
"Yeah, these are employees, so they're probably a little bit more fanatic than others," admitted Edwards. "But I think that there is a following out there who certainly wants these things and want to be able to say, 'Hey, I'm part of this cool thing called Yahoo."
Being part of something cool, after all, is the message that branding is all about. And while not a few Web-based businesses have tried to leverage their cool into profits, few have taken the leap to mall-mentality marketing. "I haven't seen anybody else doing this, in terms of taking it offline for purposes of branding," said Jill Frankle, senior analyst of the new-media markets group at International Data Corporation. But the strategy is, in a sense, only natural.
"Brand is really critical at this stage in the game in terms of Internet usage," she said. "This is one strategy they're taking so that, when people come online, they think Yahoo."
And despite all the lofty talk about community-building and personal identity, Yahoo admits that ubiquity is the goal. "As a company, we're all about bringing audiences together with advertisers, bringing buyers together with merchants," explained Edwards. "For us to continue to get more than our fair share of users coming to us, this is a very important strategy."
