Nodal Bits

The Yellow Pages Group in Canada has announced a new logo makeover:

I really hate to think about how much was likely spent on this! I think the new logo is such a continued representation of the legacy yellow pages that it was pointless to make a change to it at all.

Marc Tellier, president and CEO of the Yellow Pages Group, stated that “…The message it sends is that [the company] is multi-platform: we’re online, we’re mobile and we are still the leading and most widely used print directory in the country.”

So, they changed the iconography of the “walking fingers”, removing the book symbol shape from it. Yet, it’s still yellow, it still has the well-known walking fingers (which are daily less representative of how consumers find local information), and it still uses the “Yellow Pages” brandname. I think the majority of users will miss the fact that the book has been removed from the symbol, and thus the significance of the change will be lost upon them entirely.

There’s nothing about the new logo which communicates “multi-platform”, and the continued use of the “Yellow Pages” name so strongly references the print directory product that the change will likely not halt the trend making the product seem less relevant to the consumers of today.

The Canadian print yellow pages companies have thus far bucked the trend of eroding consumer usage, but I think there are indications that the Canadian market is beginning to experience the same behavioral shifts we’ve seen in the States. Not only are consumers there leaving phone books for new media, but consumer groups are popping up to complain about print yellow pages being left on their doorsteps, just as we’ve seen in the USA. I think the trend has been delayed there, giving them more time to prepare for it, but developments such as this pretend rebranding show that extra head start they’ve had has been wasted.

It would require a few orders of magnitude greater budget than a slight logo facelift to bolster the Yellow Pages brandname, and unless that is done, a trumped-up logo tweak paired with a press release is spending money at the wrong end of the equation.

Postscript: see also Greg Sterling’s post on YPG’s new image campaign.

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Tags: brand names, branding, Canada Yellow Pages, local marketing, logos, marketing, trends, Yellow Pages

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 27th, 2010 at 4:03 pm and is filed under Yellow Pages. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.