Internal Branding at Yahoo

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This document is authorized for use only by alvaro reynoso at Universidad Francisco Marroquin until October 2013. Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. [email protected] or 617.783.7860.

CASE: HR-25 B DATE: 02/07/06

Tim Perlstein, MBA 2004, and Aneesha Capur prepared this case under the supervision of Professor Charles O’Reilly as the basis for class discussion rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of an administrative situation. Copyright © 2006 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. To order copies or request permission to reproduce materials, e-mail the Case Writing Office at: [email protected] or write: Case Writing Office, Stanford Graduate School of Business, 518 Memorial Way, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-5015. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, used in a spreadsheet, or transmitted in any form or by any means –– electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise –– without the permission of the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

INTERNAL BRANDING AT YAHOO!: CRAFTING THE EMPLOYEE VALUE PROPOSITION

When I got to Yahoo! I was absolutely amazed at this whole branding feeling. There was purple and yellow everywhere, we had a beautiful campus, everything was branded: our cafeteria (‘Eat at Url’s’), stars on every cube. On any given week you can have your hair cut, your teeth cleaned, your car washed, your dry cleaning picked up and delivered at your cube. There’s a company store. If you forget to bring your spouse a birthday card or something, they sell them there. There are flowers, you name it. So I asked somebody: How did this all come about, what’s the brand, what’s the promise, why do we have this? And nobody knew.

—Libby Sartain, Chief People Officer, Yahoo! Inc.

On a late spring day in 2004, Libby Sartain, chief people officer at Yahoo!, reflected on her recent achievements. In 2001, Sartain had arrived at Yahoo! to find a demoralized Internet company without a well-defined culture, a coordinated method to communicate with employees, or developed processes, policies and procedures. Almost three years had passed since her arrival, and the company was definitely not the same. Since 2001 the organization had faced⎯and overcome⎯some crucial challenges and, for the moment at least, it seemed the worst was over. Daily page views were up to 2.4 billion (versus 65 million in 1997). Yahoo! Web sites reached over 274 million unique users in over 25 countries and in 13 languages. And with six major acquisitions since Terry Semel’s arrival as CEO (including high-profile deals with HotJobs, Inktomi, and Overture), the company now employed more than 4,000 people at its Sunnyvale, California headquarters, and 2,000 more overseas. Sartain had been working hard at launching an internal branding campaign at Yahoo! and transforming the company from its start-up culture to a more traditional organization. She could justifiably take pride in the company’s accomplishments. However, some questions still remained unanswered: Had the company culture really been transformed for the long term? Was the internal branding campaign truly successful?

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FLASHBACK: 2001 In Sartain’s first year at Yahoo!, the company was sent reeling by the collapse of the “dot-com bubble.” Sky-high public valuations of Internet companies like Yahoo! plummeted. Confidence in the tech sector evaporated, and with it, much of Yahoo!’s revenue. For the first time in its history as a public company, Yahoo! was forced to lay off a substantial part of its workforce. The first round occurred in April, when about 12 percent of employees were let go. The second round happened in December (four months after Sartain’s arrival) when an additional 10 percent was cut. According to recruiter Ken Perluss, “The first layoff in April was purely an economic situation. We’d overextended. In December, it was not as much of an economic situation as us making a decision about where we were going to invest our resources and what we were going to stop doing.” Predictably, morale at Yahoo! was shaken. This formerly high-flying startup and darling of the dot-com boom had hit its first patch of serious turbulence. Employees who had signed on to a culture based on the “3Fs”⎯Fast, Fun, and Focused−⎯now had to contend with staff reductions, a suddenly bleak labor market, diminishing stock options, and an uncertain corporate future (at the time, many analysts believed Yahoo!’s best hope for survival was a merger with an established traditional media company, along the lines of an AOL/TimeWarner combination). Compounding matters was the company’s stock price, which had plummeted from over $100 in December 1999 to below $10 by March 2001 (see Exhibit 1). As in many Internet startups, the vast majority of the company’s employees held stock options⎯most of which were now underwater. The final factor contributing to the company’s trouble was uncertainty at the senior executive level. Many of the company’s top officers departed during the turmoil, leaving CEO Terry Semel with an incomplete executive team. Moreover, he had yet to articulate his vision and strategy for the company, and the economic landscape was deteriorating. Thrown unexpectedly into this turbulent environment, Sartain quickly established her key priorities: first, to rationalize the firm’s organizational structure in line with Semel’s strategy for Yahoo! and to fill vacancies at the senior management level in order to build a strong, well-rounded executive team; second, to identify the key attributes of the company’s culture in order to create a meaningful employee value proposition that would be aligned with Semel’s and the new executive team’s strategy and vision; third, to successfully implement structures, processes, and metrics needed to overcome the company’s challenges and support its organizational evolution; fourth, to launch a full-fledged internal branding campaign that would tie together all these changes while communicating the unifying themes behind them in order to support the company’s strategy and fully align the internal organization with its external brand.

SEMEL’S STRATEGY

The first thing Sartain needed to understand to proceed with her priorities was what Semel’s new strategy would be for the company. Fortunately, his vision was not long in coming. Newly installed as chairman and CEO (he arrived in May 2001, just three months before Sartain), Semel

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focused his efforts on finding a way to stop the hemorrhaging of online advertising revenue⎯ the company’s lifeblood. Until the dot-com crash, 90 percent of Yahoo!’s revenues came from display advertising (the sale of advertising space on its Web sites, in units, such as Web banners). Most of this revenue came from other Internet startups that spent heavily on advertising during the boom years. In the wake of the bursting dot-com bubble, however, many of these startups went out of business, and those that remained hoarded cash. When the advertising market failed to recover quickly, Yahoo!’s only significant revenue stream dried up, sending the company into crisis. Semel immediately identified the risk of relying solely on ad revenue from startup companies. To shore up revenues, Yahoo! began courting larger, more established advertisers such as consumer packaged goods companies, car manufacturers, and movie studios. These more conservative companies had been slow to fully embrace the Internet. Semel, however, believed they could be won over, and that building relationships with cash-flush, well-established advertisers would stabilize Yahoo!’s revenue base. Semel’s next challenge was to diversify Yahoo!’s revenue stream to mitigate its vulnerability to a volatile online advertising market. He reportedly researched hundreds of potential online business opportunities before focusing on two areas: premium services and text-based, contextual search advertising. Premium services denoted content or enhanced product features (such as more e-mail storage space) for which users would be charged a fee. The opportunity, however, was easier to identify than to implement. Since Yahoo! already offered most online services for free, the company would have to balance rolling out compelling new fee-based services and satisfying customer expectations which generally assumed that everything on the Internet should be free. The key challenge would be identifying content and features that customers would be willing to pay for, and pricing them appropriately. Text-based, contextual search advertising was a concept that had been largely pioneered by Yahoo!’s rival Google. The concept was simple: when a user ran a search, related paid links would appear alongside results generated organically by the search engine. This service was becoming increasingly popular with advertisers since it allowed them to buy ads on a “pay per performance” basis. Also, since the ads appeared on pages that were relevant to the user’s search, advertisers were able to achieve higher click-thru rates than traditional online display advertising generated. In 2001, however, Yahoo! lacked the technology to independently offer contextual search-based advertising. Its search technology was licensed from Google, its chief rival. Offering this service on its own would require a significant technology upgrade⎯and a severance of Yahoo!’s relationship with Google. Under Semel, Yahoo! laid the groundwork for this move by acquiring Inktomi and Overture in 2003. Inktomi was a well-regarded software company specializing in search. Overture had its own search technology, and also competed directly with Google to provide contextual advertising. Technologies acquired from these companies would form the

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core of Yahoo’s new search product, and ultimately enable it to end its licensing agreement with Google. Together, display advertising, search advertising, and premium services would form the three pillars of Yahoo!’s revenue model and competitive strategy. More broadly, Semel and his team wanted Yahoo! to be “the most essential global Internet service for consumers and businesses.” To support this strategy, Sartain knew, further internal changes would be required.

NEW ARCHITECTURE, NEW BLOOD

A senior executive team, including Semel and Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang, worked to rationalize Yahoo!’s highly fragmented organizational structure. Some 40 to 50 independent business lines were consolidated into five or six key “verticals.” These verticals were divided roughly by product type, and included Media and Content (music, news, finance, autos, etc.), Consumer Services (wireless, Internet access partnerships such as SBC/Yahoo!), Communications (e-mail, instant messaging, groups, etc.), and Search. The reason for the restructuring was to increase coordination between businesses, and to increase the level of accountability of business line managers and senior executives. As head of Human Resources, Sartain was instrumental in filling key executive openings. Three roles were critical for her HR mission and the company’s future: the chief operating officer (COO), chief communications officer (CCO), and chief marketing officer (CMO). By 2002, Sartain’s efforts to fill these vacancies began to pay off. In March of that year, Chris Castro was hired from the Walt Disney Company to serve as CCO. For the COO position, Yahoo! recruited Dan Rosensweig, president of CNET networks, who joined in April 2002. And in June 2003, Yahoo! chose an executive from the world of “traditional” consumer products to serve as chief marketing officer: Cammie Dunaway, VP and general manager of kids and teen brands at the Pepsi-owned Frito-Lay Company. (See Exhibit 2 for full executive bios.) Sartain knew these new hires would be key allies in facilitating her efforts to improve the company’s internal organization. More importantly, the newly formed executive team would build out the new strategy for the company and play a critical role in realizing Semel’s vision.

Changes in HR

Concurrent with these organization-wide changes, Sartain was taking steps to restructure Yahoo!’s HR department and institute a system based on her 13 years of experience at Southwest Airlines, during the last six of which Sartain was VP of People (from 1995 to 2001). This system featured three key departments. The first, Global Rewards, managed compensation and benefits and was responsible for HR information systems. This department was small and relied heavily on a suite of automated tools. The second department, Talent Acquisition and Development, managed recruitment, performance review, and internal development (still a relatively novel concept at Yahoo!). Sartain’s third division consisted of HR “generalists,” who worked directly with internal clients to understand their business needs and resolve any “people-related” issues. To deliver HR services, these generalists relied heavily on the tools and systems developed by the other two HR groups, and fostered a new sense of partnership in the interaction between HR and the business units.

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Leading this system was a team of HR managers that included both new hires as well as seasoned Yahoo! veterans. Lorree Farrar served as vice president for Global Rewards, and Barbara Oshima joined in 2002 as global benefits manager. Carol Mahoney led Talent Acquisition, and reported to Cheryl Van, who also supervised Learning and Development. Pranesh Anthapur, VP of HR Strategic Partnership, a veteran of Yahoo! who joined in 1999, had global responsibility for the HR generalists.

INTERNAL BRANDING: LAYING THE FOUNDATION

Sartain recognized that structural changes alone would not be enough to secure the company’s success. Throughout the ongoing reorganization, Yahoo!’s morale remained low. Its stock price did not recover, and there was still no telling how the organization as a whole would respond to Semel’s new direction. The organizational culture, prominent from the beginning, would inevitably play an important role. Yahoo!’s distinctive culture had evolved during the gung-ho days of the dot-com boom, when massive growth was the norm, and creativity, irreverence, and an egalitarian spirit were nurtured. Now that the organization was transitioning from a cheeky startup to a stable company, the culture would need to evolve. At Southwest, Sartain had built her career around the idea of culture as competitive advantage. She had been instrumental in creating one of the strongest, most distinctive corporate cultures in American business⎯one widely heralded as a key component of the airline’s success. Sartain had aligned Southwest’s external branding with the slogan created by her HR department⎯ “Freedom Begins with Me”⎯which became a rallying cry for employees, and deliberately echoed the themes of individuality, independence, and initiative portrayed in the airline’s advertising. Sartain continued to align internal practices with external messaging throughout her time at Southwest, and towards the end of her tenure she began referring to such practices as “internal branding.” The phrase, rather than implying a specific set of practices, conveyed the idea that a company’s internal and external messaging should be harmonized to better support corporate strategy. Sartain believed so strongly in this idea that she eventually came to describe internal branding as HR’s “special sauce.” Not surprisingly, this would become a guiding principle of her work at Yahoo!, as well. But would the same things that worked at an airline work at an Internet media company? What could be done the same, and what had to be done differently? To Sartain, there was only one way to find out.

Culture & Values

With the HR organizational structure created and key executive hires behind her, Sartain’s next priority was to assess the overall state of Yahoo!’s company culture. Accordingly, to take the pulse of the organization⎯in effect, to determine her starting point⎯Sartain enlisted Emerge International, a consulting firm, to deploy an employee questionnaire called the Cultural Health Index.

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Results of the survey provided some interesting insights. Employees generally regarded their working relationships as healthy. According to Sartain, “90 percent of our employees had very healthy relationships with their co-workers and their supervisors, so that’s fabulous because that’s something hard to turn around if it’s broken.” She added, “The company that administered the index said ‘We’ve never seen anything like this… you are doing something right here.’” The company was also given high marks for encouraging creativity, innovation, and teamwork. However, only 50 percent of respondents felt that work was well coordinated within their unit. There was concern that the company’s growth had outstripped its infrastructure, and many employees expressed mystification over the company’s decision-making processes. Many considered formal policies and processes to be a hindrance, rather than a help, in their day-to-day jobs.

“What Sucks?”

Armed with better information about the state of corporate culture, Sartain was ready to tackle the issue of company values – a concern that had been a hallmark of her time at Southwest. Identifying core corporate values, Sartain believed, would be key to helping Yahoo! regain its balance in these challenging times. Before the company could foster a uniform culture, Sartain reasoned, it needed to know what it stood for. In fact, others had already begun to pose similar questions. Sartain recalled:

The media asked; employees asked at all-hands meetings. One of the most common questions was ‘What does Yahoo! want to be when they grow up?’ That’s exactly how they would ask it. So Terry [Semel] said we really should come up with an answer. We embarked on a project to define our mission, vision and values. But before we could even start our COO [Rosensweig] wrote either an IM or an e-mail in the middle of the night and just wrote down the mission and that was it, it got published… and it just stuck.

The mission was “to become the most essential Internet service for businesses and consumers.” However, having a mission did not immediately pinpoint company values. According to Sartain:

We worked on that probably close to a year, and what was hard about it was, again, nobody wanted to sit down and talk about their values when they were busy trying to make numbers and profits… . One day, [co-founder] David Filo said, ‘Why do we have to sit around and talk about these values; why can’t we talk about what sucks?’

“What sucks,” as it turned out, would be another idea that “just stuck.” Sartain was well aware that company co-founders Yang and Filo were widely acknowledged to embody the “spirit” of the organization. With that in mind, Sartain decided that “what sucks” was as good a place as any to start talking about values. In a series of discussions with employees across the organization, the company began compiling an eclectic list of “What sucks at Yahoo!” and found that employees preferred to speak of values

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in these terms. The list ultimately included more than 50 items, and was published (in slightly tamer form) on the Yahoo! website as a list of “Things We Don’t Value.” The list included broken links, decaf, bad grammar, early meetings, arrogance, yesterday’s news, and “all work, no fooz” (see Exhibit 3). The exercise helped the company to overcome organizational resistance to the idea of corporate values. A list of “What We Value at Yahoo!” (see Exhibit 4) was published on the company Web site as a corollary to “what sucks.” Finally, the foundation for Sartain’s internal branding efforts was beginning to take shape. And, as she had anticipated, the organization was finding its bearings.

The Employee Value Proposition

After assessing the company’s cultural health and gaining new insight into its values, Sartain’s challenge was to determine how to evolve the organization’s culture so that it embodied the key values that had been identified. As head of HR, how could she enable this transformation? Sartain employed another concept that had crystallized during her tenure at Southwest⎯that of a company’s “employee value proposition.” Over the course of her career, Sartain had come to believe that many companies were taking their employee relationships for granted. She said:

We have to create a new definition of loyalty and trust. Constantly re-recruiting our people, adhering to our values, honest communication, execution of our strategies and delivering results, that’s what will rebuild the trust… . We’re not asking people to come work for us for the rest of their lives⎯those days are over. But we’re asking them to come work for us and while they’re here, trust us and feel good about it. And as long as it’s working for you and working for us, let’s do something great together.

For Sartain, this mutual agreement was the essence of a company’s employee value proposition: a clear, honest statement of what employees could and should expect from the organization, in exchange for their effort and loyalty. Armed with her recently identified corporate values, Sartain was ready to stake out a unique employee value proposition at Yahoo!. She said, “We really want to have a lot of key messages for employees about what the employee experience is, how it’s differentiated. We want to have those same messages for leaders about their important role in delivering that differentiated experience.” Sartain believed this differentiation was a prerequisite for building a distinctive internal brand identity. In assessing the company’s value proposition, employees considered multiple factors: compensation, company culture and the opportunity to work on a well-known product in a cutting-edge industry were all part of the equation. But in Sartain’s view, the company still had to understand how employees weighted different components of the value proposition relative to one another. How, for example, did health insurance stack up against stock options? Free coffee vs. on-site dry cleaning? Sartain’s challenge was to better understand these variables, and find an effective way to market the total package throughout the organization.

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Talent Acquisition In Sartain’s view, the company’s first opportunity to present its employee value proposition was during the recruitment process⎯most people’s first in-depth experience with Yahoo! as an organization. By clearly communicating values and expectations, HR could help the organization screen for fit (not necessarily a new idea at Yahoo!), and set the tone for a candidate’s future interaction with the company as an employee. Under Sartain, the recruitment function was undergoing a transformation. Prior to her arrival, the process was arbitrary⎯a candidate’s experience could vary widely depending on the department or group doing the hiring. Managers were rarely provided with formal guidelines for hiring, and not all were skilled at interviewing and recruiting. There were reports of candidates left waiting for hours in company reception areas because managers had forgotten that they had scheduled an interview. Sartain changed this, both by changing the way her own department operated, and by providing detailed guidelines for managers on how to recruit successfully. Her aim was to provide a consistent recruitment experience for all candidates⎯one that provided a clear (and positive) impression of Yahoo!’s employee value proposition. It was clear that Yahoo!’s hiring needs were not the same as they had been during the boom years. The labor market had changed dramatically since the beginning of 2001. The Bay Area’s high tech sector swung from being one of the country’s tightest labor markets to one of the softest. Thanks in part to Resumix, Yahoo!’s online resume submission and recruitment tool, the company was receiving between 8,000 and 10,000 unsolicited resumes a day. But the company was no longer focused on bringing in enough bodies to sustain its meteoric growth. In order to execute Semel’s new strategy successfully⎯with its focus on preserving revenue and controlling costs⎯the company needed to find the right candidates. Now it was not quantity, but quality, that mattered. One example of this shift concerned the people who developed new products and services for Yahoo!’s Web sites. Traditionally, these employees, known as producers, had a background in programming and Web site design. Over time, however, managers believed that products should be developed and managed by people who specialized in the business side of Web services and possessed the leadership skills needed to manage the increasingly complex production process. In the tech industry, such people were referred to as product managers, and Yahoo!’s recruitment efforts shifted toward identifying candidates with this particular skill set. Technical skills would still be valued, but producers would no longer drive the product development process. Keeping in mind these evolving requirements, Sartain’s goal was to turn Yahoo!’s recruitment process into a “talent machine”⎯a finely tuned operation that continually supplied top-tier candidates to support the company’s strategy. As always, “fit” would play an important role in determining an employee’s success within the organization, and a clear employee value proposition would help recruiters and managers screen out candidates for whom fit was a problem. The converse was also true. Sartain believed that the soft high tech labor market was temporary, and it would not be long before Yahoo! would once again be forced to compete fiercely for top-tier talent. A highly differentiated employee value proposition would provide the company with an edge in attracting and retaining top-tier candidates⎯provided such candidates

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found the overall value compelling. Over time, Sartain hoped it would also reduce average recruitment costs and employee turnover.

Compensation Almost by definition, compensation was a key part of any company’s employee value proposition. Sartain’s Global Rewards Group was responsible for establishing Yahoo!’s compensation policies, and the team led by Lorree Farrar quickly identified discrepancies between company policy and reality. In general, base pay at Yahoo! was intended to be set around the 50-60th percentile of current market rates. Yahoo! preferred to position itself as an employer of choice; therefore employees were expected to provide their labor at a discount. However, the actual figure was closer to the 80th percentile. Though official policy was to offer incentive compensation at above-market rates, in reality, bonus pay was largely unknown at Yahoo! (with the exception of certain sales divisions). Instead, the company’s long-standing practice was to provide almost all of its employees with stock options. The actual proportion of option holders was somewhat uncertain, but universally acknowledged to be high. Oshima estimated that 95 percent of employees held options. Such grants had long been considered a staple of the Yahoo! culture (as it was at many companies founded during the Internet boom), and was regarded favorably. Many employees praised Yahoo!’s “culture of ownership,” and considered options to be a powerful motivational tool. On the other hand, some managers had begun to have second thoughts about the company’s liberal use of stock options. Given the drop in Yahoo!’s stock price, many outstanding options were underwater, thus limiting their motivational potential. Some managers said that underwater options had a negative effect on motivation since they showed how far the company’s price had fallen. In addition, several executives and board members questioned the value of issuing options to employees whose roles offered little chance to directly affect the company’s share price. In order to partially offset the effects of underwater options, and to create additional motivational tools, the executive team, facilitated by HR, proposed moving toward a compensation structure more weighted towards cash-based incentive pay. At the time, no Yahoo! employees had any kind of bonus plan, and many in the organization were uncertain about how such a system could or should be implemented. One concern was the implied cultural shift from an “egalitarian” society to that of a “meritocracy”. If certain employees were singled out for exceptional performance, what message did that send to those who were not? Stock options, on the other hand, were more nondiscriminating. All option holders either benefited together or suffered together⎯and this had been long-standing company practice.

Other Benefits In addition to obvious drivers of value such as salary and stock options, Sartain and her team sought to promote awareness of⎯and an appreciation for⎯other, less obvious perks of employment. These were numerous and varied, including:

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• A beautiful campus-like environment (especially at the company’s Sunnyvale headquarters).

• Brash purple and bold décor. • Conference rooms with whimsical pop cultural names like “Phish Food” and “Chutes and

Ladders.” • An egalitarian environment in which every employee, including Semel, Yang, and Filo,

occupied a cubicle rather than a private office. • Amenities such as on-site car washes, dental clinics, a subsidized cafeteria, gymnasiums,

basketball courts, and dry cleaning services. • Free coffee bars in every Yahoo! Building. • Easy access to multiple foosball tables (a tribute to the company’s roots as a fun Internet

startup). • The cachet of an iconic Internet brand. • An atmosphere of teamwork, creativity, and “fun.” • The chance to work on products that were viewed and used by millions of people every

day. HR staffers often cited the last point as a key factor in attracting top talent to Yahoo!. Another justification for these perks, less frequently discussed outside the HR department, was the degree to which these amenities boosted productivity by enticing employees to spend more time at the office. Indeed, many Yahoo! employees took pride in working long hours, and it was widely agreed that the company culture encouraged such dedication.

Policies and Processes

Concurrent with her focus on employee value, Sartain had other, more practical, concerns to address. The Cultural Health Index indicated a dire need for more and better information about company processes and policies, at all levels of the organization. Employees were frustrated by what they perceived as organizational obstacles to the daily tasks they were asked to accomplish. Until such concerns were adequately addressed, they would hinder the success of any internal branding campaign. Conversely, a well-executed program to rectify these shortcomings would provide valuable support for such an effort.

Here Come the Guides The traditional HR response to these practical concerns was to create a comprehensive policy manual. Sartain joked, “It was every HR person’s dream. We had to write a policy manual. You know, we live for that!” But based on her understanding of Yahoo!’s culture, she believed the organization would have either a negative reaction or no response at all to something so prosaic. Nevertheless, the need for clarification was real. According to Sartain:

Everybody was like, ‘Okay, we'll just write a policy manual,’ and I said ‘No, we won’t write a policy manual, let’s think of what we’re really doing here.’ So… we said what is Yahoo!… if we were branding Yahoo!, how would we brand it? And we finally came out with Yahoo! as a guide, which interestingly was one of

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the concepts that was coming out when we later did our branding. So we came up with a Guide To Working At Yahoo!. It’s not a book, it’s not a handbook, it’s not a policy manual, but it is an online interactive guide. And when we did all of our presentations, we did it as if it was a Yahoo! map, so it had the same kind of graphics. So it looked consistent with our product branding.

The Guide To Working At Yahoo! was followed by a Guide to Paying at Yahoo!, a Guide to Recognition and Rewards at Yahoo!, a Guide to Hiring at Yahoo!, and a Guide to Ethical Business Conduct at Yahoo! Perhaps the most eagerly anticipated addition to the series, a Guide to Getting Stuff Done at Yahoo!, served as a roadmap to Yahoo!’s new organizational structure, and was intended to dispel some of the confusion surrounding the organization’s decision-making processes. (See Exhibit 5 for an example of a Guide and Exhibit 6 for product branding on the external customer site.)

Career Development From 1995 through 2001, Yahoo! had little time to focus on training and development. The company’s growth was too rapid, creating more vacancies than could be filled through internal promotions and redeployments. The infrastructure to support internal career changes was essentially nonexistent. Having been hired to fill a particular role, employees rarely had the option to prepare for other challenges. As a result, external hiring became the default practice. The combination of rapid growth and lack of training contributed to the complaints about opaque company policies and processes. In response, Sartain placed a renewed emphasis on Learning and Development. The team had several mandates: to boost the skills of Yahoo!’s workforce; improve the company’s managerial talent; and give all employees a greater sense of mobility within the company. Sartain explained: “The way we’re starting is, we’re offering a personal-growth course for employees to show them how to pursue their career development. When they take the course, their manager is asked to take a corresponding course on how to mentor growth. So that will be the first step and then we’ll build layers upon that, and eventually, I’d like to have mentoring and developing part of the performance criteria.” Sartain also saw Learning and Development as a potentially important component of Yahoo!’s employee value proposition. The idea of a company where a career could grow and evolve over time was compelling⎯especially during an economic downturn that had left many candidates yearning for a greater sense of security. Development opportunities would also help reduce costs over time.

Reviews & Recognition Like career development, regular performance reviews had been the exception rather than the norm at Yahoo!. In a company preoccupied by growth, systematic feedback had fallen by the wayside. In addition, since there had been little formal career development and few employees received any kind of incentive compensation, reviews did not have any practical consequences. Sartain considered all this to be an oversight reflective of the startup Yahoo! culture. How could talent be developed internally if it was never assessed? If the company was to move toward a meritocratic culture based on incentive compensation, regular performance reviews were

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necessary. Employees and managers would need guidance, and the rules and procedures would need to be carefully defined. These were outlined in Sartain’s Guide to Working at Yahoo!. In addition to formal reviews, Sartain worked with the senior executive team and her HR staff to devise other mechanisms to motivate employees and recognize outstanding performance. This, she believed, would further improve retention rates for high-potential employees. She explained:

At Yahoo!, there really weren’t any formal reward programs when we got there. So we immediately created a superstar award to reward innovation and adherence to our new business strategy… . We also introduced a budget for leaders so that you could give spot rewards to people, and we came up with lots of ideas to get this rewarding in⎯because one of the things I’ve found in Silicon Valley companies and in growing companies is it seems like it’s all about money, and at some point money really isn’t as meaningful.

The superstar program took its name from the fact that all Yahoo! employees had gold stars hanging in their cubes with their names and years of arrival at Yahoo! (e.g., “Class of 2000”). The informal, nonmonetary rewards budget was well received. Sartain offered the following anecdote:

There is a young person that works with us in our communications effort and she did not have a DVD player… . Someone found out she was renting all these videos and was trying to go through them to find little snips on a video that she was making for us, and she actually did the Yahoo! yodel event. So we wanted to do something special for her, and her boss first said, ‘Oh, I’m going to give her a dinner for two in San Francisco.’ Okay. This is a 27-year-old who doesn’t have a significant other. She didn’t really want a dinner for two in San Francisco. Luckily the boss had been to our training and then said, ‘Well, yeah, that isn’t the right gift for this person, but she needs a DVD player’⎯so she gave her the latest, greatest, state-of-the-art DVD player. This young woman was running through the halls going, ‘I can’t believe my boss gave me a DVD player!’… I mean you could have given her, you know, enough money to buy 10 DVD players, and she wouldn’t have been half as excited as she was getting the one DVD player.

Yahoo! Backyard Perhaps the most critical component of Sartain’s recommended logistical changes was the creation of Yahoo! Backyard, the company’s Intranet system. Ironically, before Sartain’s arrival the world’s best-known digital information portal had no digital portal of its own. This made it difficult to share information across the company, and contributed to the increasing fragmentation of Yahoo!’s business units. Sartain recognized that a centralized system for internal communications would be necessary to build a consistent corporate culture. Yahoo! Backyard was the team’s solution (see Exhibit 7). Deployed in 2003, Backyard was based on the simple, intuitive interface of Yahoo!’s public Web sites. Finally, everyone in the company had access to the same news and information, regardless of their physical location. Answers to questions could be distributed quickly, problems

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addressed rapidly, and successes celebrated communally. The site had other practical uses as well: it hosted a complete employee directory with pictures, the company’s Guides to internal processes, and information on other HR functions such as recruitment and compensation. These useful features guaranteed that the site would be used frequently⎯usually daily⎯by every company employee, making it easy to share the latest news.

Workplace Wackiness Sartain recognized the importance of group rituals as well as the central role of wacky fun in Yahoo!’s culture and was happy to be a participant. For example, she recalled, “We played an April fools’ joke where we sent out an e-mail from Juan Valdez saying that we’d started charging for coffee. The e-mail said that the caffeinated coffee was cheaper than decaf because we want you to be productive. And then we had a picture of Juan with his donkey on Backyard. People looked up Juan Valdez ’cause it was just from J. Valdez at Yahoo!. Everybody thought that was really cool. So, now we have to figure out how we’re going to do another April fools’ joke next year.” The fun factor was also on Sartain’s mind when she joined a thousand or so fellow Yahoos on the Sunnyvale campus for a group yodel in 2003 (see Exhibit 8). Taylor Marie Ware, a nine- year-old from Tennessee who had recently won Yahoo!’s Favorite Amateur Yodeler contest, also took part in the group yodel at Sunnyvale. The event was covered by CNN, and entered into the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest group yodel in history. Sartain reflected, “It was seen all over the world, the buzz was created, but the energy level was so great, and to see these engineers… they usually don’t stand in rooms and yodel for an hour, so it was really great… and those are the kind of celebrations that build the culture.”

INTERNAL BRANDING TAKES OFF

With so many structural and procedural changes to implement, Sartain and her team were kept busy over the first three years of her tenure. But she never lost sight of her larger goal: to launch a full-fledged internal branding campaign that would tie together all these changes while communicating the unifying themes behind them in order to support the company’s strategy and fully align the internal organization with its external brand. However, there was a catch: Yahoo!’s external brand had not yet been defined. It was not until the CMO, Cammie Dunaway, joined in 2003 that the final piece of the puzzle fell into place. With Dunaway onboard, Sartain had a partner who would clarify Yahoo!’s brand positioning and help communicate that brand throughout the organization. Armed with three years’ worth of insights into Yahoo!’s strategy, culture, processes and potential, Sartain set out to accelerate her internal branding plan to full throttle.

Partnership with Marketing

Sartain was instrumental in selecting Dunaway as CMO. She had played a key role in all of Yahoo!’s recent key executive hires, and had been explicit in her desire to find candidates who were as excited about building brands internally, as well as externally. Recalling her meetings with Dunaway, Rosensweig, and Castro, Sartain recalled, “Each one of them understood the

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power of the brand, they understood the concept of the brand, and during the interview I talked to them about the need for internal branding and they were interested in working on that.” The partnership between marketing and HR was planned from the start, and its benefits proved twofold. Sartain said, “Since I was able to help hire our new chief marketing officer, I was able to find someone who was really interested in this subject and so now HR is involved with the marketing team in picking the whole brand of the company. So it’s not going to be like an external brand and an internal brand, but the brand will work in both places.” Dunaway brought discipline, rigor and enthusiasm to the endeavor. Looking back, she recalled:

I probably wasn’t here two weeks before Libby was in my office saying, ‘Okay! You’re here! Chris Castro and I are so excited! We have got to get going on this internal brand piece.’… They had started brainstorming some ideas and working on it, and working on things like the corporate values over the course of last year. And so I said, ‘Absolutely! I believe in this! But I think that before we run off down the executional path, we really need to take a step back and make sure that we really understand the brand DNA, what’s made us great in the past and what’s the environment out there that we need to be aware of as we think about where the brand needs to go in the future. So, let us do a deep dive on Yahoo! positioning, knowing that our employees will be a key constituent that’ll be a key source of input to the whole positioning project. But let us take some time to really reflect on the outer brand.’

The internal branding partnership included Murray Gaylord, Yahoo!’s vice president of Brand Marketing. Soho Square, Yahoo!’s new advertising agency, which had been created specifically to service the Yahoo! account by its parent company, WPP, was also actively involved. All parties coordinated their efforts to ensure consistency across all brand messaging.

“Life Engine”

As Sartain, Dunaway, and their colleagues explored Yahoo!’s brand potential, both inside and out, they came to agree on several key insights that would form the basis for the brand’s new “DNA”. One was a sense of aspiration. Sartain explained, “Yahoo! is something bigger, and that to me is going to be the real powerful key internally and externally, because people really do look for meaning. And if they’re working at Yahoo! they really are going to be part of being something bigger than themselves.” Another key attribute was Yahoo!’s function as a “guide”⎯a metaphor Sartain had already hit upon in her series of online information modules. According to Sartain, “Yahoo!’s sort of a compass... it helps you find your way here… and it also helps you find what you need. When you’re driven to accomplish it helps you be more creative. And that’s a way to feed your brain and fuel your soul with whatever’s out there.” Embracing these concepts, the team agreed upon “Life Engine” as their unifying brand concept. The simple phrase was meant to convey empowerment and direction, and emphasize that Yahoo!’s relevance extended beyond the bounds of the online world into the real one. Sartain

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explained, “After brainstorming all day we figured out that ‘Life Engine’ works internally and externally; we really don’t need a separate brand, but how Yahoo! is your life engine would differ whether you are an external customer or an internal customer.” To external users, “Life Engine” would suggest all the ways in which Yahoo! functioned as a kind of universal guide. To employees, it would encompass that meaning, plus all the ways in which working at Yahoo! “powered” all other facets of their lives, from life insurance to free caffe lattes. TV spots for the “Life Engine” ad campaign featured unusual pairings of Yahoo! users, some famous, others not. One ad showcased a deaf woman, who explained in sign language how she used Yahoo! to connect with the world. Another featured political humorists Ben Stein and Al Franken deadpanning their opinions on what Republicans were most likely to search for on Yahoo! (Stein: “Volunteer work…”; Franken: “Yachts.”). All spots ended with the tagline: “Yahoo!: It’s a Life Engine.” (see Exhibit 9). Internally, “Life Engine” messaging was supported in a number of ways. Oversize posters based on the external ads were prominently displayed in halls and on cubicle walls (see Exhibit 10). Every employee was given a customized license plate frame that read: “Yahoo!: My _____ Engine”, allowing employees to fill in a personalized 20-letter description. Similarly, on “Analyst Day,” when Wall Street researchers descended on the Yahoo! campus, they too were given nametags with the same text. Dunaway recalled several analysts filling in the blanks to create phrases like “My Growth Engine”⎯surely a positive sign from the investment community. Sartain’s plate read: “My Fun Place to Work Engine” (see Exhibit 11). The presentation of HR materials would also be transformed to match the new campaign. According to Sartain, “To make it come to life, we are repackaging our entire benefits program, and we’re going to have to come up with some ‘engine’ about how that works. But we’re going to package benefits with the amenities that we have also on campus, and then also with the partners and products that we have” (see Exhibit 12). In addition, the company also ran a high-profile contest inviting employees to write brief descriptions of how Yahoo! served as their life engine. The writer of the most compelling testimony would be awarded a brand-new Harley Davidson motorcycle⎯an extremely literal symbol of the “life engine” concept. The contest was promoted dramatically at a company gathering at Yahoo!’s Sunnyvale headquarters. As hundreds of startled Yahoos looked on, a helmeted, leather-clad biker rode into the meeting on the Harley, engine blaring. When the motor cut, the helmet came off to reveal the CFO Susan Decker⎯clad in a special shirt designed to simulate a motley collection of biker tattoos (see Exhibit 13). The write-in response to the contest exceeded expectations. Some employees wrote about their work lives; others shared personal, often poignant stories about how Yahoo! had served as their own “life engine” (see Exhibit 14). Reading the responses, Sartain and Dunaway felt their efforts had been successful.

PUTTING THE ENGINE IN HIGH GEAR…

Sartain looked back on the past three years with a sense of accomplishment. The internal branding campaign was still a work in progress, but she was pleased with its development. The

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company was responding well, and all indications suggested that the culture was evolving. Semel’s three-part competitive strategy seemed to be paying off: Yahoo!’s stock price had more than tripled since the start of 2002, and 2003 net income was nearly $238 million, versus a loss of nearly $93 million for 2001. Internally, though, several questions lingered. The debate over compensation and stock options still remained unresolved. Would incentive pay ever be fully embraced at Yahoo!? How would the company balance the competing demands of egalitarianism and meritocracy? Would moving away from the principle of universal ownership cause long-term damage? More broadly, there were some who wondered whether a company’s culture could ever really be changed in anything more than a superficial way, especially through the efforts of an HR team. If that was the case, should it even be attempted, or were the potential costs too great? The long-term success of Semel’s⎯and Sartain’s⎯strategy was still undetermined. And there were those in the organization who wondered whether, in a company where so few employees had direct contact with customers, internal branding was really worth the effort. How important were the notions of internal branding and company culture if the company faced another downturn? Would it be better to focus company resources and employee attention elsewhere? Sartain never claimed to have all the answers. But she believed strongly in the merits of her approach, and looked forward to continuing her quest to resolve important employee-related issues at Yahoo! and strengthen the company’s unique internal brand.

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Exhibit 1 Chart of Yahoo!’s Stock Price

April 1996 – April 2005

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

April

-96

July

-96

Oct

ober

-96

Janu

ary-

97Ap

ril-9

7Ju

ly-9

7O

ctob

er-9

7Ja

nuar

y-98

April

-98

July

-98

Oct

ober

-98

Janu

ary-

99Ap

ril-9

9Ju

ly-9

9O

ctob

er-9

9Ja

nuar

y-00

April

-00

July

-00

Oct

ober

-00

Janu

ary-

01Ap

ril-0

1Ju

ly-0

1O

ctob

er-0

1Ja

nuar

y-02

April

-02

July

-02

Oct

ober

-02

Janu

ary-

03Ap

ril-0

3Ju

ly-0

3O

ctob

er-0

3Ja

nuar

y-04

April

-04

July

-04

Oct

ober

-04

Janu

ary-

05Ap

ril-0

5

Source: Company Web site.

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Exhibit 2 Select Executive Bios

Chris Castro Chief Communications Officer Senior Vice President

Christine Castro joined Yahoo! in March of 2002. An executive with more than 15 years of experience in corporate communications and public relations, Castro previously was vice president for corporate communications at The Walt Disney Company. Castro was responsible for leading Yahoo!'s worldwide communications efforts, including public and media relations; corporate reputation management; corporate, financial and employee communications; and crisis and issues management. Castro reported to Yahoo! Inc. chairman and chief executive officer Terry Semel.

In her role as vice president for corporate communications at The Walt Disney Company, Castro managed corporate communications issues and initiatives including mergers and acquisitions, financial reporting, legislative and regulatory issues, branding and executive communications. Castro joined Disney in 1999 as director of corporate communications.

Prior to her experience at Disney, Castro was director of corporate communications for SunAmerica Inc., a Los Angeles-based financial services and investment company. While at SunAmerica, she managed media relations activities, as well as employee communications and speechwriting for the company's top executives. Prior to joining SunAmerica in 1995, Castro spent four years at Rockwell International as manager of employee communications programs. At Rockwell, she handled corporate-level employee communications and media relations. Castro has also worked as a reporter and editor.

Castro received a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism and a Master of Arts degree in communications management from the University of Southern California. She was a member of the board of directors for the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute. Cammie Dunaway Chief Marketing Officer

Cammie Dunaway joined Yahoo! in June 2003 as chief marketing officer, responsible for leading Yahoo!'s worldwide branding efforts and driving the company's product marketing initiatives. A seasoned executive with nearly 20 years of marketing experience, Dunaway oversaw all of Yahoo!'s consumer, enterprise and partnership marketing initiatives, from product planning and positioning to execution of customer acquisition and retention strategies for Yahoo!'s premium and subscription services.

Prior to joining the company, Dunaway spent 13 years at Frito-Lay Company, supervising such prominent brands as Doritos, Cheetos, Lays, Ruffles and Rold Gold Pretzels. As vice president and general manager of kids and teen brands at Frito-Lay Company, Dunaway managed volume and profit growth on a $3.5 billion portfolio and leveraged the Internet to reach this enigmatic demographic. She rebuilt Doritos.com and redirected the brand's Super Bowl media funds toward interactive marketing to fuel increased sales.

Dunaway received a BS in business administration from the University of Richmond and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She was named as one of the 100 Top Marketers by Advertising Age magazine and oversaw the Doritos "Bold and Daring" advertising campaign, which was named the top campaign for 2001 by the American Advertising Association.

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Dan Rosensweig Chief Operating Officer

Daniel Rosensweig was appointed chief operating officer of Yahoo! in April 2002. Reporting to Chairman and CEO Terry Semel, Rosensweig oversaw the operations of Yahoo! worldwide. Functions that reported to him include product development, marketing, international operations, and North American operations, which encompassed the Company's six business units and advertising sales.

Prior to joining Yahoo!, Rosensweig was president of CNET Networks, a position he took on following the merger of ZDNet and CNET in 2000. In this capacity, Rosensweig was responsible for many of the operations globally, and played a critical role in overseeing the successful integration of the two companies. During his tenure, Rosensweig was also a key participant in company-wide efforts to develop and introduce innovative new Internet advertising formats, such as interactive messaging units.

Before joining CNET Networks, Rosensweig was an 18-year veteran of Ziff-Davis, where he served in many capacities, including president and chief executive officer of ZDNet, Inc. from 1997 to 2000. Rosensweig built ZDNet as a standalone company from Ziff-Davis, successfully took the company public, grew the business to become both profitable and among the top 20 most visited networks on the Internet, and finally merged with CNET. Rosensweig was president of Ziff-Davis Internet Publishing Group from 1996 to 1997, where he oversaw magazine titles such as Inter@ctive Week and Yahoo! Internet Life. Rosensweig was vice-president and publisher of PC Magazine from 1994 to 1996, and associate publisher from 1992 to 1994. Under his tenure, PC Magazine became the leading computer magazine in both audience reach and revenue. Rosensweig also held various other positions at Ziff-Davis in advertising sales, classified ad sales, and circulation. Rosensweig received a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Hobart College, Geneva, New York. Libby Sartain Senior Vice President, Human Resources and Chief People Officer

With more than 25 years of experience in human resource management, Libby Sartain was responsible for leading Yahoo! Inc.'s global human resources efforts and managing and developing the human resources team. She also focused on attracting, retaining, and developing Yahoo!'s employees who promote and strengthen the company culture, as well as represent the powerful Yahoo! brand.

Prior to joining Yahoo! in August 2001, Sartain was vice president of people at Southwest Airlines. An employee of Southwest Airlines since 1988, Sartain managed a staff of 300 and led all human resources functions at the airline, including employment, training, benefits and compensation. She also played a key role in developing an employment brand strategy, which helped double employee growth in six years.

Sartain also served as chairman of the Society for Human Resource Management and was named fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources. Sartain received a BA. degree in business administration at Southern Methodist University and an MBA from the University of North Texas.

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Terry Semel Chairman, Chief Executive Officer

Terry Semel joined Yahoo!Inc. as chairman and chief executive officer in May 2001. He led a successful transition of the company by identifying and pursuing new opportunities within Yahoo!'s two core businesses, marketing services and consumer services. He also assembled a talented executive team that oversaw the continued growth of Yahoo!'s global user base, a turnaround in Yahoo!'s marketing services offerings, and introduced new revenue opportunities, including sponsored search, listings and services bundled with high-speed Internet access.

Previously, Semel spent 24 years at Warner Bros., and was most noted for his role as chairman and co-chief executive officer where he and Robert Daly helped build Warner Bros. into one of the world's largest and most creative media and entertainment enterprises. Like Yahoo!, Warner Bros. reached billions of worldwide consumers through its vast stable of properties. Semel was credited with building Warner Bros. from a single revenue source generating less than $1 billion to nearly $11 billion total revenues from multiple, diverse businesses in 50 countries. Prior to Warner Bros., Semel managed Walt Disney's Theatrical Distribution division, and CBS' Theatrical Distribution division.

During this time, Semel was on the board of directors of Polo Ralph Lauren Corporation, Revlon, Inc. and the Guggenheim Museum. Source: Company Web site (as of July 2005).

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Exhibit 3 Things We Don’t Value at Yahoo!

What We Don’t Value…

Bureaucracy Entitlement

Broken links Too big for your britches

Ho-hum All work, no fooz

Decaf ALL CAPS

Losing Closed doors

Good enough Same ol' same ol'

Boring Vaporware

Arrogance 20/20 hindsight

A stick in the eye Fads

Discrimination Swashbuckling

Status quo Early meetings

A cog in the wheel Missing the boat

Formality Behind the curve

Bugs Head in the sand

Irrelevance Following

Sloth Bad apples

CD-ROMs in the mail High horses

Pop-ups Impossible

Quick fix One size fits all

Passing the buck Playing catchup

Shoes worn at all times Yesterday's news

Micromanaging All bark

90% Spam

Additives & preservatives Shoulda Coulda Woulda

Hurry up & wait Typos

Bad grammar Rear view mirror

Monday morning quarterback Punching the clock Source: Company Web site.

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Exhibit 4 What We Value at Yahoo!

We Value… Our mission is to be the most essential global Internet service for consumers and businesses. How we pursue that mission is influenced by a set of core values - the standards that guide interactions with fellow Yahoos, the principles that direct how we service our customers, the ideals that drive what we do and how we do it. Many of our values were put into practice by two guys in a trailer some time ago; others reflect ambitions as our company grows. All of them are what we strive to achieve every day. Excellence: We are committed to winning with integrity. We know leadership is hard won and should never be taken for granted. We aspire to flawless execution and don't take shortcuts on quality. We seek the best talent and promote its development. We are flexible and learn from our mistakes.

Teamwork: We treat one another with respect and communicate openly. We foster collaboration while maintaining individual accountability. We encourage the best ideas to surface from anywhere within the organization. We appreciate the value of multiple perspectives and diverse expertise.

Innovation: We thrive on creativity and ingenuity. We seek the innovations and ideas that can change the world. We anticipate market trends and move quickly to embrace them. We are not afraid to take informed, responsible risk.

Community: We share an infectious sense of mission to make an impact on society and empower consumers in ways never before possible. We are committed to serving both the Internet community and our own communities.

Customer Fixation: We respect our customers above all else and never forget that they come to us by choice. We share a personal responsibility to maintain our customers' loyalty and trust. We listen and respond to our customers and seek to exceed their expectations.

Fun: We believe humor is essential to success. We applaud irreverence and don't take ourselves too seriously. We celebrate achievement. We yodel.


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Exhibit 5 Guide2Paying@Yahoo!

Zoom In [ 1 ]

2 [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] [ 6 ] [ 7 ] [ 8 ] [ 9 ] [ 10 ]

Zoom Out

Full Route •Total Comp Philosophy •Salary Ranges •FLSA (exempt/non-exempt)

Destination Interactive Map•“How to”guide • Gets you where you’re going

Source: Information provided by Yahoo!.

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Exhibit 6 Yahoo! External Customer Site


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Exhibit 7 Yahoo Backyard


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Exhibit 8 2003 Yahoo! Yodel Challenge


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Exhibit 9 Life Engine Ad Campaign


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Exhibit 10 Internal Life Engine Messaging


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Exhibit 11 Sartain’s Customized License Plate


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Exhibit 12 Branded HR Products

MyLife: MyRewards

MyLife: MyBenefits


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Exhibit 13 CFO Susan Decker at Life Engine Contest


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Exhibit 14 Sample Employee Write-in to Life Engine Contest

Yahoo! is my Giants engine…my Barry-just-hit-another-one engine, my Jack-Clark-throwback-jersey-for-less-than-retail engine, my I-can-still-be-a-fan-down-in-Socal engine. It’s also my surf report engine, my will-I-need-sunblock? engine, my where-can-I-get-a-good-burrito-in-San-Clemente? engine. It’s my mail engine, my keep-in-touch-with-friends-and-family-while-traveling-engine, my stock engine, my election engine, my news engine, my boy-that’s-a-great-picture-of-Britney-Spears engine. It’s my movie engine, my music engine, my sold-my-car-in-a-week engine (my “engine” engine, if you will), my keep-in-touch-with-old-coworkers-on-Groups engine, and even my hey-bro-check-out-this-girl-on-personals-she’s-cute-and-lives-by-you-why-don’t-you-send-her-an-Icebreaker? engine. Yahoo! is also my job engine. It’s my purple and yellow engine, my flip-flops at work engine, my free coffee engine, my who-picked-out-all-Krackles-and-just-left-the—original-flavor-Trident? engine, my getting-chased-by-geese-on-the-trails engine, my standing-next-to-Filo-ordering-Pacific-Rim engine, my 6-years-of-ups-and-downs-but-mostly-ups-from-98-to-2004-can-you-believe-it’s-been-that-long? engine. Yahoo! is my home engine, my home-away-from-home engine, my friend engine, my first-thing-in-the-morning-and-last-thing-at-night-engine, and my-only-damn-engine-since-1996...engine. Source: Information provided by Yahoo!.

Documents

Internal Branding at Yahoo