Note: This post is the 5th 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.
Captain Contact - Our company hero!
Alright, here’s the deal. If you work at a technology company and you start screaming at the top of your lungs that the company brand is going to change, you’re most likely going to be met with a bunch of blank stares. Branding is a pretty ethereal term to most folks, especially those that work at innovative internet companies. And WhitePages is no different. When we first started talking about this initiative, I was surprised to learn that most of our 120 employees associated ‘brand’ with colors and logos….and in a number of cases, with a cartoon character. (Seriously. At one point, Captain Contact represented the WhitePages brand. We’ve since buried him).
So, knowing that we had a challenge on our hands based on perceptions of rebrand efforts in years past, we pushed hard to make sure that everybody at the company actually understood what branding meant, how it would drive value, and most importantly, why we needed to reposition our brand in order to achieve our long-term objectives. Not easy. Try telling a bunch of developers that we’re going to start making product decisions based on our brand platform, personality traits and attributes. Riiiiiight….and who are you, the marketing fluff guy? I can’t imagine it’s that much different at other tech companies.
The rest of this post discusses what we did to help make ‘branding’ a bit more understandable and believable to our employees. Some of our tactics worked, some didn’t. And people are still trying to wrap their hands around the entire effort…which is totally expected. But I’m pretty stoked with what we were able to accomplish and the ensuing change in thinking that we’re starting to see across the company.
Step 1: Form a key-stakeholder Team to define the Brand Platform
Knowing that we needed Executive involvement across all of the departments at WhitePages, we put together a cross-functional Team that was responsible for identifying, debating and ultimately finalizing our brand platform. Included on this Team were our Founder and CEO, COO, and our VP’s of Sales, BizDev and Marketing. I also asked one of our most respected engineers to join, as well as our Head of User Experience and Design. I knew that it was imperative to have the last two individuals involved given the breadth and depth of work that would be required on the Product side. With their buy-in, I figured it would make it a little easier to rollout the branding effort to the rest of the company.
Step 2: Give our Designers ownership of the Visual Identity
Graphics Designers, User Interface and Web Designers are the folks who will ultimately work with our Visual Identity day in and day out. Getting them involved with the process early on, in my mind, was critical, as it provided them with an opportunity to define HOW they wanted to work with the new brand. If they were happy with the visual identity and took ownership (these folks were actually responsible for introducing the visual identity to the company. Big unveiling Very spirited!), then we were more apt to succeed in getting buy-in from other employees. Alexi and Isiah talk more about this effort in their Visual Identity post. An instrumental move and one that I think is necessary for any brand effort.
Step 3: Form a cross-functional Brand Committee
There was no way in hell I was going to be able to single-handedly communicate our ‘brand’ to all of the WP departments. I needed help in a big way. We felt that bringing together employees from different parts of the company to essentially serve as brand stewards would help tremendously. Not only would these folks help us define how we were going to educate people, but they would also help identify where their specific departments needed to better align with the newly defined strategic brand platform. In a sense, the brand committee members were the eyes and ears of this effort. They provided feedback, helped address concerns, identified issues, and most importantly, helped to evangelize the effort….and even came up with a tagline for the whole thing: ‘We Are WhitePages’. (check out the video. Sweet!). They were our offensive line, so to speak, and it was imperative that they truly understood the what, why’s and how’s of this initiative.
Step 4: Educate employees and Align the brand
Once the Brand Committee was formed, the real work began. Working together, we focused on two primary 
deliverables; educating the rest of the company on ‘brand’ and identifying how and what each department needed to do to align with the new brand. Education was straightforward. Using our respective understanding of each of our departments, we developed some creative ways (or so we thought) of bringing the brand to life. Most of these ideas were in the form of activities, ranging from simple coffee-talks to all-out company happy hours…and in one case, pictures of Captain Contact in uncompromising positions that didn’t align with our brand attributes. That didn’t go over so well with HR? Oops. Alignment was a bit more complex and took more of a structured approach. Having a good idea of what needs to change in an organization requires 1) an understanding of what you’re trying to do and 2) asking a ton of questions. I relied heavily on the Committee members to proactively identify what alignment was required in their respective departments. No way I was going to be able to tackle that one alone. (fyi…what is alignment? Could be messaging in our HR collateral, the process for developing learning plans, how we display ads on the site, and of course, what our product actually looks like). If you really want more details on exactly what we did from an activities perspective, just comment below!
In the end, the education and alignment efforts covered about a 6 month span, with the site redesign taking the most effort (and is still going right now). In terms of what worked? Well, getting people involved from across the company early on was a huge win. By the time we were ready to seriously start implementing our new brand platform, around 
20 people were already intricately involved. They understood the rational and it became so much easier to explain to other employees the what’s, why’s and how’s. What didn’t work? As much fun as we had pulling off some of our educational activities, we could have done better. We were so focused on making the activities ‘fun’ and ‘entertaining’ that we lost site of the primary objective. If I had it to do over, I’d probably focus less on activities and more on substance and depth….but of course, still using Brand Committee representatives as stewards.
And the results: things are certainly changing. The new WhitePages corporate site launched, our new product site is launching very soon, our visual identity was rolled out and individual departments are aligning themselves to the brand. And the biggest win? I have developers asking me how they can apply our brand platform to their day to day jobs. Now that is Awesome!
As always, feel free to post your questions, comments and criticisms below. Or for the faint of heart, just send me an email.
John
Twitter: www.twitter.com/johnlusk
Other Brand Series Posts:
The Series Introduction: WhitePages Site Redesign
Market Research and Analysis
Strategic Brand Platform
Defining our Visual Identity
Related posts:
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
In line with John’s post regarding brand being more than just colors and logos, and that it needs to be integrated into everything we do internally, just like Captain Contact, “HR” is dead here at WhitePages.
Why?
We believe that our employees are more than just “human” and that each and everyone one of us here at WhitePages are the best, brightest, passionate and most “talented” individuals in the industry!
So in line with our brand personalities: “Talent Services” is more Straightforward, Sincere, Good Humored, Contermporary, Smart and more Friendly than the old HR.
Deborah Huyer
Sr. Director, Talent Services
On behalf of the entire Talent Services Team at WhitePages