Before you take me for some kind of Yahoo hater, I’m not. (Actually, I’m quite a fan of the Carol Bartz style of no-nonsense management – typified by the last few lines here) In fact my irritation with them stems from their relative disinterest towards a few tools that were original pathbreakers and that they’ve had for a long time – most importantly ‘delicious’, but I’ve written about that earlier, and some work on that service has happened since. So, anyway, Yahoo, this is not about you, you were simply a prolongued prologue, and a good example.

A couple of weeks back, when writing about Wave, I’d wondered  “is brand equity an excuse/surrogate for thin value, and exist only in theory, or until the last good product?” This entire activity above somehow reminded me of that. Brand equity, and the lord knows there’s no shortage of definitions. (ignore the newspaper brand references)  So why did I think brand equity is now a surrogate/excuse for thin value?

Every brand that enjoys good equity now must have provided ‘thick value’ at some point of time, to its audience. At some point though, did the ‘brand’ take over, and the focus become more on perception management, rather than as an aid to retaining/attracting customers. Is that the reason why brands in many industries cannot find a way past the disruption they’ve been facing – because they’ve been focused on creating brand equity basis communication and superficial value additions, and sticking way too close to the specifics, like competition, and not bothering about the generic fulfilment of a need?(classic example, newspapers and news delivery) Somewhere did brand and marketing communication start dominating the proceedings, at the cost of the basics – a product solving a need/a distribution that increases convenience/the factor that built the equity in the first place? And then did they shortchange consumers by putting a premium on the brand’s equity without delivering value? While trying to build the emotional connect and create a value perception beyond the commoditisation, did the means become the end?

Take Yahoo for example. By an unfortunate coincidence, last week, GMail replaced Yahoo Mail as the most popular email service in India. I can imagine why. Like many others, I have multiple Gmail ids, and a Yahoo id too. While I open Yahoo because of a couple of e-groups, GMail is my primary communication centre. It has never been static, features and tools have been added to a point where I wonder how I worked without them. (try operating in basic HTML for a while) I checked Yahoo out again, with as fresh a perspective as i could, and didn’t find anything that could make me consider a shift. I still use Delicious a lot, and it still has a lot of equity (in my mind) going for it. Yahoo’s brand campaigns have nothing to do with it.

Maybe the concept of brand equity had some merit when the audience didn’t talk to each other, but as WOM keeps getting bigger,  push brand communication is bound to become more meaningless. As consumption patterns change, needs change, distribution systems change, as real-time becomes the norm,  and exit barriers and costs for consumers come down, relying on a static and uni dimensional concept of brand equity is bound to be harmful. Also, with fragmenting media, fragmenting audiences, and an increasing importance for ‘my experience’, brand equity will be different things to different people at different times, and even the hazy setof objective measurements in vogue today, would be rendered ineffective. (Yes, it might have been the same before, but in an earlier era, consumers did not talk to each other, and it was easy to push the brand’s equity on to consumers). (Generalising, but) Take a look at the communication and taglines adopted by brands, their superficiality, the efforts that go into forcing the tagline’s emotion/value into the actual value provided, and thereby build/increase brand equity and you’ll see what I mean.

Perhaps, product equity will be the only measure that matters, and brand equity will be earned and burned real time, as consumers share feedback and rely on their trusted sources for updates, and historic performances will decrease in significance. (when the Fail Whale comes out on Twitter, evangelists become bloodhounds, or whatever..you know what I mean) And so perhaps, from a brand perspective, its about time that meaningless communication took a back seat, and we went back to the basics of brand equity, that may mean redefining the roles and responsibilities of everyone associated with ‘brand’ as a function. Because if you’re good, they’ll talk about you, and if you’re bad, they’ll talk more about you

But you know what, I had more fun when i thought about a parallel. Thought leaders. Replace ‘brand equity’ with ‘thought leaders’ (or personal brand equity) and tell me what you think.

UPDATE: Yahoo hires a new agency, tells Ogilvy “It’s not Y!ou”.. Damn, that was fast!!

UPDATE 2 Meanwhile, a homepage redesign gives them 9% more page views and 20% more time spent.

until next time, equitable solutions..

Bonus Reads:

Braggarts take over the web

Almost unrelated, but an excellent read – Jerry Yang’s Advice in Interesting Times (via @mukund)

Remembered them because, even though they were late entrants into the arena, the ‘invite’ marketing really worked for GMail, and though competitors matched or improved their storage space factor, GMail was so good, that I have never felt the need to consider an option. Thats also because while most other players stopped after they matched the space and minor additions, GMail kept improving, and still does – check this and this. And the counter on the GMail homepage continues to increase. Constant improvement.

Meanwhile, the proposed competitor to email, micro blogging, and more specifically Twitter also seems to be on a constant improvement mode. After being heavily criticised for their downtime, they seem to be getting that under control and now the rumour mills are abuzz with their proposed purchase of Summize.

On the flip side, I saw a video sharing site – Viddler.com, with some pretty cool features, like being able to add tags and comments right within the timeline. So when a scene appears, the comment appears right then. I haven’t seen too many innovations from YouTube recently. I also read a nice article recently, on how del.icio.us had perhaps lost the chance to become Friendfeed. Intriguing, right? Perhaps, Yahoo may be getting the message, and hence this radical move in the search space, where lots of new players like Yoozilla, Gloofi, Evri and possibly a dozen others are cropping up and doing amazing things that Google is perhaps missing out on. And while Google ups the ante in virtual worlds with the launch of Lively, there is Vivaty, which is ‘virtual world meets social networking’

So, is improvement a function of current size? When a player gets beyond a certain size (in terms of products, sales, manpower and so on) is it then tougher for them to improve constantly.? Does the growth curve plateau and newer, smallers start taking the shine off from the once nimble large player? If we stretch that and step back a bit, is that the reason why say, a traditional set of players like newspapers are having problems adjusting to the web (generalising here) while new entities like Instablogs or possibly soon, a Topix (a potentially cool site, you must take a look) increase in popularity and relevance?

In the future, will this constant improvement create a scenario where services will, in short time frames , change so rapidly, that they will bear only a slight resemblance to what they started out as, with only the brand name being a constant, a brand that stands for the cutting edge in that service category?

until next time, zen and the art of constant improvement