Tearing Up the Yellow Pages

New Yellow Pages logo, new online services; but are Yellow Media’s strategies enough to adapt to Web 2.0?

For generations, the Yellow Pages has been the Cheshire Cat of search: when you didn’t quite know where you wanted to go, it was there to help you. Fortunately, the Yellow Pages was a bit less smug than Alice’s grinning guide. All you had to do was let your fingers do the walking, and … snap, you could find it, whatever it was.

Walking fingers were a metaphor for saving time and effort: rather than go out and look for a plumber, restaurant, or escort service, you could stay at home, browse the Pages and call. These days, fingers don’t so much walk as hop, skip, and jump across the keyboard; paper pages are more likely to be unwanted clutter than anything useful; and you don’t need to stay home now: you can call while you’re on the move.

For all these reasons, the Pages were starting to look a bit, well, yellow, like that old newspaper in the garden shed: a tired, faded relic.

Fresh with the unmistakable flush of a great brainstorming session, the management of Yellow Pages announced their master plan. They would change the logo. No longer would the fingers walk across the pages of a book: they would instead be suspended in yellow space. Let your fingers do the floating.

The new logo is an incremental, cautious change. It has all the hallmarks of design by committee.

You can see where it came from. With 20 per cent of business and most of the growth coming from the web, the paper pages were no longer relevant. But it is only 20 per cent – not enough to justify showing the fingers walking across a keyboard. So they are suspended in space. The colour yellow is part of the brand name, so it had to be there. And the fingers, well, the fingers have been there for so long, they couldn’t be taken away.

Looking at the new logo, one is reminded not so much of fingers as of that feeling you get when you step from a dock onto a boat. Will the boat sail away just as you are stepping aboard? The fingers float in that moment of tension between the certainty of the past and an unpredictable future. But for Yellow Pages, the boat may have already set sail.

To its credit, its parent company, Yellow Media, has launched some other strategies: it’s offering webpage production services to small businesses and has acquired several sites, including PriceCanada.com and 411.ca. But even these may not be enough to save it.

The challenges media organizations face are fundamental and permanent. They are “adaptive” challenges, major shifts in technology, perceptions, or economic factors that threaten the very existence of a business. Challenges such as these require management to question the very models that made it successful in the past. The more successful the business has been, the harder that is: we cling to our models at the best of times, but particularly at the worst of times, when they seem to be all we have.

As the internet advances, the web is increasingly a user-driven environment. Twitter, Facebook, blogs, Wikipedia, YouTube, and many other sites have created Web 2.0, a culture in which advertisers are only one voice among many. In Web 2.0, individuals control the agenda as never before.

Smart marketers have seen this. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign was successful not only because it reached out to young voters through social media, but also because it allowed for, and encouraged, a dialogue in which voters could be heard, noted, and answered. Unilever has cleverly used YouTube to advertise its Dove and Axe brands, knowing users will make parodies of them and welcoming this as part of the brand’s dialogue with consumers.

Users are more likely to look to other users for information than to advertisers, and Yellow Media’s webpage production services may soon be as irrelevant as those phone books that go straight into the recycling bin. As the Cheshire Cat said, “If you walk long enough, you are sure to wind up somewhere.” It remains to be seen whether that somewhere is a place Yellow Media wants to be.