Note: This post is the 3rd in a series on Brand Building that highlights the approach that WhitePages has taken over the past 15 months to build and reposition its brand.
Alright. Last week I touched briefly on the market research and analysis that we performed prior to all of our branding efforts. Before I start discussing our ‘brand platform’, I need to emphasize how much information and detail I’m leaving out of some of these posts. Trying to figure out how to include everything in a way that’s easy to understand, makes sense to most readers and doesn’t completely give away our company strategy is pretty hard. If we miss something and you want us to address, just let us know in the comments section below.
The first step in tackling the brand initiative was to identify the specific objectives that we wanted to achieve. Given that we’d never really gone through an effort like this in the past, it was imperative that we got buy-in and agreement across the company on a set of unified goals. In the end, we identified three key objectives:
- Align the brand based on the future vision of WhitePages: You gotta know where you’re going before setting a direction. Important…and a great exercise.
- Position WhitePages uniquely with customers: We knew based on our research that customers were crying for a service that was differentiated, had personality and didn’t have the feel of your typical paper phonebook experience (again, we’re not the phonebook!).
- Develop a brand platform that enhances the customer experience: We wanted to move WhitePages.com beyond just being a functional website.
Addressing the above areas and getting to the point where we had alignment across the company required a ridiculous amount of discussion and debate. I don’t want to belittle the effort that went into making all of this happen, but again, it’s kind of hard for me to write about everything and keep this post short, and at least somewhat entertaining.
So, on that note, I’ll focus the rest of this post no our brand platform objective. There are a number of ways to define a ‘brand platform’ and like all other companies out there, we felt that our definition was different than anybody else’s. Ultimately, we felt that our platform needed to address the following areas: 
Company Mission
The fundamental reason WhitePages exists. ‘We make it fantastically simple for everyone to find each other and connect with confidence.‘ Simple, to the point and something that employees can easily remember.
Positioning Statement
How do we differentiate ourselves? I can’t give you all of the details on this one (transparency does have its limits!), but know that we want to be THE place where people can find contact information on anything, anytime and anywhere. Go wild with that one.
Personality
How our brand relates to customers with its distinctive tone and manner? Our next post will go into much more detail on our ‘personality’ and how it’s shaping our brand identity, so I won’t go into too much detail here. But for the most part, we want to come across as Straightforward and Friendly…with a little bit of good humor mixed in. 
Brand Attributes
The principles we live by. Our values and character. The attributes that were mentioned in the first Brand Building Series post are based on several data points: our customers, our internal value system and our vision. These attributes will guide us in everything we do at WhitePages from product development to sales & marketing.
Brand Architecture
How our different brands (domains) are related to, and differentiated from, one anothe? We basically made 3 brand architecture recommendations:
- Change the company name from WhitePages.com, Inc. to WhitePages, Inc. WhitePages.com was too limiting and gives people the perception that you can only find us online. That’s clearly not the case (check out WhitePages Mobile) Also known as the Monolithic Brand or Brand House approach for all of you Brand savants out there.
- Focus primarily on the WhitePages.com domain. We have a bunch of different domains and each serves a specific strategic and business purpose. In order to succeed in building the WhitePages brand, we’ll need to put most of our brand-building efforts into the new WhitePages.com site.
- Ensure that all of our business partners give WhitePages some props. WhitePages provides the data for a number of different partners (MSN, US Postal Service, AOL). Users of these sites need to know that the data that they get is a service of WhitePages. Kind of like ‘Intel Inside’ on all of the PC’s out there. This tactic helps to build the WhitePages brand when we’re an ‘ingredient’ for other products and services.
Once the brand architecture was finalized, we officially put to rest the strategic component of our brand building efforts. No more research, no more brainstorming sessions and no more debate. Just fundamental execution. The key takeaway from this initial work? These recommendations not only guided our decisions over the past 15 months but will also play a critical role in shaping our decisions in years to come. Subsequent posts in the Brand Series will continuously mention components of our brand platform, so you’ll most likely see some of these points mentioned again.
If you have any questions regarding the process for defining our brand platform, please feel free to comment below or contact me directly by email.
Next Post: We’ll talk about our Brand Identity
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi,
Wene coming this new whitepages out?
Its that a bigger databas i can search on whitepages coming out !?
Thx
Rickard,
Tankard,
The full release will go out in 6 weeks. We’ll be rolling out the first ‘beta’ in a couple of weeks so you might have an opportunity to see it live then. Feel free to check out our Sneak Peak (just go to http://www.whitepages.com). We’re always adding more data to our database, including user contributed information!
john