Fahy, 38, admits that Yahoo!'s simple founding premise of ‘making sense of the web' has been lost in the growth of the business from a two-man backroom project at its birth in 1994 to company with a user base of 500m today.
Yahoo!'s struggle to fend off Google's seemingly unassailable dominance seems to be making it tough for the company to find a voice for all its services. Fahy says this has not gone unnoticed internally and emphasises the spirit of ‘openness' that is emerging in its third-party web applications, the offer of access to its search infrastructure to other websites, and its communications strategy.
Just over a year ago, Yahoo! did not have a marketing representative on the European management team. When Fahy was handed the role his initial task was to put marketing back into the business decision-making mix. ‘The original role was a consultancy one, to work across lots of parts of the business and make them understand we should put the customer at the centre,' he adds.
The time came to stop ‘just growing', take stock, and be more communicative about Yahoo!'s aims as a business. Last year, it ran a preview session for the media about its upcoming products and services, the first in several years.
Fahy points to a shift in how companies engage with consumers. He highlights Walkers' competition to find a new flavour of crisps as an example of the way that seemingly closed-off companies are opening up and being ‘grown up'.
Similarly, he says, Yahoo! has ‘to go back out and talk to people'. ‘You have to tell them the new things and get them excited,' he adds. ‘There is no point in the engineers doing open ID access and speaking to Google and Microsoft, but at the corporate level us not sharing our products and services. We have to take what makes the internet special to work in and apply it to the rest of the business.'
As for how to put this strategy into action, Fahy says brand and marketing is not solely about how a company looks or what its communications are, but ‘what we do and how we do it'.
‘We need to look at what our story is, the people we need to talk to, and the best communication tools to do that. I am more interested in the idea and deciding which channel to use to activate it than worrying about the channels,' he says.
Fahy's bugbear is the judging of marketing directors by their latest TV campaign rather than by business success. In his view, marketing is ‘about future cash flow and driving new customers into a business, customer insight and research'.
He claims that it was his views on how marketing can influence and shape a business that appealed to Yahoo! ‘I came in for a chat with Toby Coppel [Yahoo! European managing director who departed last year] and he raved about what the opportunities were for Yahoo!, without me even realising there was a role. After half an hour a guy from HR swept in and within two weeks it was done. It felt like there was a good connection between me and Yahoo!'
Fahy says he feels lucky to have worked with ‘passionate advocates' during his career, not only at Yahoo!, but also at Orange and BlackBerry, including charismatic Orange chief executive Hans Snook, BlackBerry inventor Mike Lazaridis, and Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo.
However, he adds that, like Yahoo!, Orange has become a victim of its own success - growing rapidly and having to reassess what made it successful in the first place.
‘The core idea is still absolutely correct, but the challenge for any of these companies is to look at what happens when their free time is up,' he says. ‘Yahoo! was once the only place to go to make sense of the web. Now there are a million places. That is where marketing can add a huge amount of value, taking a company back to the customer to look at what they want and shape the products around customer insight.'
Fahy claims Yahoo!'s core remains ‘making sense of the web'. He views its new homepage, which includes applications for people to check on Yahoo! and third-party email inboxes, eBay auctions and searches, as testament to the goal of giving consumers a single starting point to explore the internet.
Nonetheless, Yahoo! is battling with soft ad revenues, ongoing speculation about an acquisition by Microsoft and the disinte-gration of a planned agreement with Google to strengthen its position in online advertising. Chief executive Yang has also stepped down, to be replaced by former Autodesk boss Carol Bartz last week.
In Fahy's view, the ‘corporate stuff' is lower on the agenda than creating ‘talkability' among consumers. ‘We have 60m people coming to us every month in Europe. These are big numbers. But people don't necessarily talk about us in the media or as consumers,' he says. ‘We need to re-engage and tell our story again to customers. We have great products such as Answers, we own Flikr, we have a great sport and finance product. The challenge is to go back out and re-present Yahoo!, and with our new homepage we have a fantastic reason to believe.'
To outsiders, a Microsoft deal would help ‘fix' Yahoo!, giving the combined business the scale to compete with Google and develop products. But Fahy seems a little exasperated when asked how Yahoo! can challenge Google's dominance.
‘What Google does, it does very well, and what we do, we do very well. I think what we do is different. On our homepage, Yahoo! has news, sport, weather, and it tells you if you have mail. Google is an empty box until you activate it.'
Given that Fahy's background is in marketing and not online, he freely admits he has much to learn about the power of digital. More of a test, however, is having to accept that the scale of Yahoo!'s US services means things happen outside of his control.
Fahy is aware that his job would not suit every marketer. ‘There is so much innovation going on that if you were brought up in a Unilever or Procter & Gamble school of marketing you would find it disconcerting.' Moreover, he adds, at Yahoo!, one can only know some of what is going on, some of the time. Such a keen awareness of the nature of his task and working environment will undoubtedly stand him in good stead.