Alokananda Chakraborty: Change, and say it aloud, please

Why Yahoo! changed its logo and kicked up such a fuss

Earlier this month, Yahoo! unveiled its new logo after 30 days of showing runner-up logos that didn't make the cut. The new logo is simpler and thinner, and retains its signature purple colour, the capital letters and the exclamation mark. Chief Marketing Officer Kathy Savitt wrote in a blog post that over the past year, there's been a renewed sense of purpose and progress at the tech firm, and that it wanted everything it did to reflect this spirit of innovation. So, a new logo.

While one is not certain the new logo is all that different from the old -"we wanted a logo that stayed true to our roots (whimsical, purple, with an exclamation point) yet embraced the evolution of our product," said the company in an official post - or if the additional spends were necessary in a slow economy, it does serve one purpose: it emphasises the fact that Yahoo! is not the same company anymore.
 

Indeed. Since the time she took over the reins of the company in July last year, Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer has worked hard to reinvent the struggling internet giant. In the last 12 months itself, Yahoo! has bought more than a dozen start-ups, including the popular blogging platform Tumblr, and put some additional muscle behind some popular brands such as photo site Flickr. Her efforts haven't gone waste and Yahoo!'s stock price has shown a steady uptick. So she has a point to prove - that you should not see Yahoo! as a relic of the 1990s internet era.

While rebranding is not just about logo change - it goes much deeper and is aimed at aligning thoughts and actions of a company with that of the larger consumer base - Yahoo!'s rebranding follows similar logo changes by other aging internet giants, including AOL, eBay and Microsoft. The obvious questions is, why now? Why would these companies put valuable resources to figure out some new colour scheme and motifs when the chips are down? And, if we were to flip the question over: What is the best time for a logo change or a redesign?

There is no best time, experts will tell you. It is not like there is a rule book that says you have to relook at your logo after X number of years. It is part of the evolution a business goes through. So, the right time to look at change is when a company figures that there is a mismatch between the brand's perception and its offerings and the audience's expectation from it, before the gap starts having a negative effect on consumption.

Take the case of eBay. Its new redesign puts more focus on the visual impact of the items listed on the site and there are various posts online that described it as "Pinterest-like". Launched in 2010, pinboard-style photo-sharing website Pinterest changed the rules of the game with a simple layout and easy navigability. Now it allows businesses to create pages aimed at promoting their businesses online. Such pages can serve as a "virtual storefront". You can see eBay is feeling the pinch.

While initiating the redesign, it said that one reason it decided to change the way the site looks is to appeal to a younger generation of internet users. Ebay was launched two decades ago and now it has decided to change to make the user experience more in tune with other high-use, high-engagement sites younger users are used to. When the redesign was rolled out across Europe in June, eBay' Europe's Vice-President of marketing and advertising Alexander Von Schirmeister told Marketing Week, a leading UK magazine for marketing jobs, marketing news, opinion and information, that the new design gives control back to the user so the products they see are more relevant to them, thus offering a better shopping experience.

Now take the new Microsoft.com. It touts a "responsive home page" or a design that not only makes it more flexible, but more adaptive to the media that renders the website. The logic is that rather than tailoring different designs to an ever-increasing number of mobile/web devices, one should treat them as different windows to the same experience. So that viewers or users who jump in and out of devices now have no difficulty accessing a website. The transition is seamless with the least disruption -something new literature on retailing has started referring to as the omni-channel experience.

That is not to say there isn't a business case for separate sites for separate devices: for instance, you may feel that user demands from your mobile site are more limited in scope than that from your desktop equivalent and choose to go with different versions of your website tailored to a device. But as Microsoft sees it, that kind of design thinking will cease to be our default going forward.

So there you have it. You have to change when your consumers do and you will have to tell them that you are changing if only to keep the buzz. Admitted, the new Yahoo! logo generated considerable reaction on social media and tech blogs, much of it unfavourable. But the purpose was served: it was back in the news.