WhitePages Brand Building Series

The WhitePages Brand Building Series is an attempt by the employees of WhitePages to chronicle the initiatives leading up to the launch of our new website and brand.  The entire brand-building effort spanned approximately 16 months from February, 2008 through June, 2009 (not quite there yet).

In the spirit of transparency and in providing insights to others who might be going through, or even considering, the same initiative, the Brand Building Series is meant to educate, inform, and in some cases, inspire.  This effort was no easy task and we feel compelled to share our insights and challenges with those who are interested in how a sizeable internet publisher is attempting to reposition its brand.

The series is made up of 12 (or so) blog posts that chronologically follow the steps that WhitePages has taken over the past 16 months to reposition our brand.  The title of each post (subject to change) along with a link to the actual blog content is listed below:

1. WhitePages Site Redesign: The Series Introduction
2. Market Research and Analysis
3. Strategic Brand Platform
4. Defining our Visual Identity
5. Explaining ‘Brand’ to Employee
6. Usability Testing for our Site Redesign
7. Launching the new WhitePages Site!
8. Building the Site to Make Money
9. Brand Building: SEO, meet Usability and Brand
10. Parallels Between Agile Software Development and Branding
11. Managing a Large Development Effort
12. And the Site Officially Launches!
13. Final Wrap Up and Lessons Learned