This post will be about an article titled “What Will Marissa Do?: Yahoo CEO Zeroes in on Search, While Her Ad Team Eyes Tech Upgrade Options.”

After years of declining profits and losing the competition to Google and Microsoft in the key area of search, Yahoo decided to hire Marissa Mayer as CEO.

In the article, Marissa Mayers seeks to use her expertise in consumer search experience to find small opprtunities that could give the biggest benefit possible to the company.

Therefore, Mayers is seeking to transition her company’s strategy from a broad, differentiation strategy into a narrow, focused strategy which heavily emphasizes on its ability to differentiate.

Mayers is probably the best candidate to steer the company towards that strategy as she has the expertise and expertience necessary to understand what are the key areas that consumers want and need but is not covered by the larger competitors.

In order to achieve the strategy however, Mayers has to make tough decisions in cutting down unprofitable divisions and redirect skills and talents into new areas. More importantly, she has to completely transform the beureaucratic Yahoo to something that is lean and mean.

The ability for Yahoo to move forward hinges upon how fast can it focus its strategy, but will the massive resources of Google and Microsoft fill up opportunities faster than Yahoo can move?

As my classmate Kathy Lee has pointed out in her blog, automakers are aggresively promoting their brands by positioning what they believe to be the most important factor in the mind of the consumer.

While Audi claimed to be good at racing, Subaru claimed it has the superior engine.

While brand positioning at this level may be effective to a certain degree, what’s more important is selling the entire ‘package’ of experience to the users.

Source

As you can see above, that is a typical brand positioning graph, with two axis.

However, to be truly successful, it is important to think about multiple axis.This in turn, is selling an ecosystem.

Perhaps the importance of an ecosystem is best illustrated by Nokia. Nokia transitioned away from using their own Symbain operating system on their phones even though a lot has been invested for many years. As CEO of Nokia, Stephen Elop explains, the war is a ‘war of ecosystems’. Having the best phone hardware will not win customers because they want apps. Having the most apps will not win customers because they want integrated web services. Hardware, apps and web services are just few of the examples of which phone manufacturers are fighting to be the best in each criteria.

Therefore, to Subaru and Audi (and other car manufacturers out there):
Is having the best engine or winning the most races enough?