Yellow Book’s Henry Defends Brand’s Vitality

Yellow Pages branding has had a major shift in the past couple of years, with company after company downplaying the “Pages” part of their name, and highlighting their multi-channel capabilities, often via a generic, appealing sounding names such as Sensis, Idearc, etc.

Does that make a company named Yellow Book a dinosaur? Not according to Yellow Book’s Gordon Henry, who was appearing on a panel at Kelsey’s Directory Driven Commerce show. Henry notes that recent TV campaigns and other efforts have made Yellow Book “the No. 1 national Yellow Pages brand.”

Henry also notes that the move by several companies to take “book” out of company names is kind of silly. “Facebook has the word ‘book’ in it. It doesn’t seem to be hurting them on the Internet,” he says.

Speaking of dinosaurs, they are apparently the animal of choice at AT&T Yellow Pages. In fact, AT&T features a T Rex on the cover of its Raleigh book. The dino in question is currently on exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. I am not sure what kind of message that sends (but maybe it isn’t good!).