By: Maverick Wong
In the evolution of Yahoo, stock changes within Yahoo has a large effect on Yahoo itself. Investors will buy stocks from Yahoo because they think Yahoo is worth their money to invest in and they will get a good return. Stocks are something that relates to the stakeholders of Yahoo such as normal investors like us, the employees of Yahoo and most importantly, the stockholders of Yahoo. The stockholders of Yahoo are the most important people. They are the people who needs to be impressed and they are the people who has to get a good return in order for them to keep working with Yahoo.
Yahoo has not been doing well since around 2006 according to the Yahoo stock chart. They have been competing with their rival, Google, but Yahoo couldn’t compete with them and Google just took off. Google had ideas that Yahoo couldn’t keep up with and that is where Yahoo took a slight downturn.
Their stock has been dropping and has been hovering around the $16 per stock. For such a well-known company, 16$ per stock is not a lot and that is why the stockholders are not happy with it. This is when Marissa Mayer was hired from Google to become their new chief executive officer. Her goal after joining Yahoo is to focus on the kind of personalized, habit-forming content that people view on tablets and phones. She really wants to make a new mobile experience for the users and earn her revenue from there. At the same time, she also wants to release products and applications where it can engage consumers on a daily basis.
This ties to the situational theory is because the things that Marissa Mayer is trying to do does not happen all the time. It is a situational decision. Yahoo is falling into a hole where their stocks are dropping and consumers are using Google more than Yahoo. Google’s stocks are growing every single day and it has been up to $1000 per share while Yahoo’s stocks were staying at the $16 mark. That is a huge problem to Yahoo and Marissa Mayer is trying to help Yahoo climb out of that hole. Marissa Mayer has also used the strategy of engaging more onto consumers. She has decided to use 1.1 billion to buy Tumblr and work with Tumblr, which is one of the largest blogging website. This is an active behavior for Yahoo because Yahoo is actually seeking for more and by using Tumblr, they can connect with their consumers a lot more.
The main role of public relations is to organize and maintain the relationship between the stakeholders and the organization. So as this example has shown, Yahoo is trying really hard to connect to their stakeholders after Marissa Mayer has joined Yahoo. It doesn’t matter if stakeholders are stockholders, their employees or normal citizens who are using the Yahoo applications or websites. Marissa Mayer’s goal and strategy is try to connect everything with everyone. Another point of view is also the fact that Yahoo is actively reaching out to the world instead of waiting for consumers to come find them. And I think that is what public relations do, they actively go to different places to find people and include them into Yahoo’s community.
Source Cited
- Stone, Brad. “Can Marissa Mayer Save Yahoo?” Bloomsberg. Bloomberg, 1 Aug. 2013. Web. 4 Dec. 2013.
- Yahoo’s Basic Chart.” Chart. Yahoo Finance. Yahoo, n.d. Web. 4 Dec. 2013.