Class Live Research questions:

Yahoo is a 19 year old company with revenues exceeding $4.6B. Over 700M people visit Yahoo sites each month. It is a leading global online publisher and portal, creating and curating ccontent and providing key tools for its users (email, search, photo storage, news, etc). Yahoo’s services have become an integral part of the daily routine of many international users; especially in India, South East Asia, South America and the USA. It is in these markets that Yahoo is the most visited portal website. The company’s main competitors in Canada include: Google, MSN (Microsoft), AOL (Huffington Post), Facebook, Bell Media (TSN.ca, CTV.ca, etc) and Rogers (Chatelaine, SportsNet).

Over the last few years, the company has struggled with brand positioning to its users in the Canadian market. This is partly due to the influx of competitors and ease of entry into the Internet industry, as well as Yahoo’s rapid diversification in its services and products. The later suggests that the company offers services and content relating to various target groups; from a younger demographic on Tumblr, Flickr and Fantasy Sports – to an older audience on Yahoo Finance, News and Email.

Despite the fact that Yahoo is the #1 Sports website online (mainly due to its Fantasy Sports component), #1 in Finance and # 1 in Entertainment-News (Yahoo Celebrity), it’s struggle lies in positioning these and other paramount wins in order to maintain its audience and attract new users.

What must Yahoo Canada do in order to firstly position itself as a leader and communicate its key strengths as an internet publisher, and secondly, to maintain and grow its user base?

a.            Develop a Canadian positioning strategy for Yahoo

a1.          Develop a digital strategy to implement this positioning.

a2.          Develop key digital strategies for Yahoo to maintain & grow its user base

Contact Person: Sabiha Kasmani, Account Executive, Yahoo Canada

 

Design a digital marketing strategy for Campus Vibez that creates brand awareness and drives student engagement on university/college campuses across Canada.

For more context, see the slide deck here.

 

Contact Person: Ali Badruddin, Founder

 

JSS Juventus Soccer School

Using a boot strap strategy for a digital marketing campaign how would you market the academy on a low cost budget of $10,000 - $25,000 a year using all available creative mediums. The strategy would have to incorporate 3 parts:

  1. Parent education of Academy program and new league
  2. Player enticement
  3. Values and history behind JSS (Juventus Soccer Schools)   

Be creative and create every strategy thinking of no cost.

 

Contact Person: Anthony Paolucci, Founder

 

As an IT company, SAP is very comfortable with marketing to IT LOB as this has been our stronghold for 25 years and budgets have been in IT.  

 

With the advent of a digital economy and changes in the business community there are significant shifts taking place where technology decisions and budgets are moving to the lines of business eg: marketing, finance, HR, procurement, supply chain etc.  While we have some relationships within the LOB community, it is not where we want to be as a business and we want to increase our footprint.

 

What would you recommend as the most effective marketing strategies to build awareness and create demand in the following line of business in North America.  We are looking for a modern marketing approach to creating these relationships using a mix of traditional and digital marketing strategies:

 

LOB:  Marketing, Finance and HR.  We are looking for contacts and relationships Director level and above including CMO,CFO and CHRO.  

 

We are trying to determine where this community looks for relationships, how they consume information, decision process and online behavior so that we can best determine a marketing/digital and content strategy to develop trust, awareness, consideration and purchase of SAP solutions.

 

Contact Person: Kathryn Ferguson, Senior Director, Financial Services and Retail at SAP Marketing