Yellow Pages – A Century of Tradition Unmarred by Progress
Improving the Yellow Pages
Have you ever noticed how poorly designed the Yellow Pages really are? Interestingly, the on-line version is even worse than the print version. Have you also given any thought to how to improve the Yellow Pages, on-line or print versions? As a simple demonstration of the power of the Success PragmatiQ alignment audit, we’ll walk through a review of your average Yellow Pages to see how well it supports the objectives of the Yellow Page printer and it’s advertisers.
Our process identifies where a product design fails to align with or support a company’s business and marketing objectives. The first step must be to identify these success objectives. While that sounds trivial, in my 20 years of experience, I have never worked with a client that had a clearly defined and codified business objective. Most business objectives I’ve heard sound more like a mission statement – completely vague and incapable of guiding design directions. This is the primary reason most products fail to achieve their intended objectives. “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” – Lewis Carroll
The alignment audit process then defines the key users and their objectives. This activity has become popular and is often characterized by the development of personae and user stories. For the purpose of this brief audit, we’ll capture a few salient points to support this exercise. By the way, these user characteristics were derived using a minimal amount of user research and observation and were validated by the Yellow Pages publisher with whom I met.
We then review the tasks users perform in attempting to achieve their desired objective. This activity identifies where the design fails to support the business and user objectives.
Business and Marketing Objectives
Obviously, for most companies, the primary business and marketing objective of using the Yellow Pages is simply to increase revenue.
The most profitable ad revenue is generated from the larger, color ads. So, the objective might initially seem to be to sell more large, color ads.
A further complication is that there is a noticeable attrition in large color advertisers each year, eroding any economy of scale and requiring the sales force to resell the space, year after year. So, not only do sales reps need to sell the ad space, they need to make sure the advertiser is so happy with it that they don’t need to resell it next year, and the year after, etc.
So, the real objective is to sell recurring, large, color ad space.
Key User #1 – Advertisers
The majority of Yellow Page ads are for small professional and service companies, such as lawyers and plumbers. These advertisers typically have fewer than five employees and only one or two offices or trucks. These folks are NOT marketing geniuses and, therefore, are not likely to know how to create a compelling advertisement that attracts the type of business in which they specialize, especially in a small Yellow Page ad. They are more likely to follow a well-worn path of those who came before them, assuming that those folks actually knew what they were doing. These advertisers know their professions, but not much about business and marketing.
For purposes of this review, we will focus on a service provider – a plumber – as one of our target users.
Key User #2 – Consumers
Obviously, consumers represent another key user. These folks come at the problem from the opposite perspective of the advertiser. They don’t know what makes a good plumber or how to tell a good one from a bad one. They also don’t know what it will take to solve their problem. The knowledge gap between the consumer and the service provider is so great that it is nearly impossible for a consumer to identify the right solution from just a casual glance at an advertisement.
By the way, this is the user that MUST be satisfied in order to achieve the key business objectives. Interestingly, this is the user that the Yellow Pages publisher pays the least attention to. No wonder they are failing to achieve their business objectives.
Key Task
For purposes of this exercise, we’ll focus on a single scenario – a consumer walks down into his/her basement and finds an inch of water flooding the basement floor. Panic sets in and he/she immediately realizes that the problem cannot be solved without skilled help.
The most obvious resource is the Yellow Pages, so he/she immediately opens it, only to be confronted with an unmanageable array of plumbers. Unmanageable in that the user cannot expect to interview many or most of them to determine which one is the best choice to solve their problem. Moreover, given that he/she likely doesn’t know the difference between a good and a bad plumber, the consumer wouldn’t know what questions to ask or by what criteria to determine which plumber to hire.
About the only differentiating factors the consumer will be able to understand and use to select a plumber are time and money. Time – How soon can the plumber get there and Money – How much will it cost. Those, as you might guess, are NOT the most critical criteria. The consumer is just needs someone they can trust to fix their leaky basement.
Sometime ago, I met with one of the larger Yellow Page publishers and audited their Yellow Page book, much the same as I have done in this article. When I got to the point of describing the task – to find a plumber to fix a flooding basement – the woman sitting next to me said that she faced that very problem just the week before. I then opened the yellow pages to a particular ad and confidently exclaimed, “And you called this guy, right?” She was surprised and asked how I knew that she had, in fact, called that plumber. Because, I said, he was the only one who advertised that he fixed basement leaks.
All of the other ads focused on things that meant something to the service provider, but had no direct relationship to the consumers, such as years of service, 24-hour availability, memberships to various trade and service organizations, etc., but no others described what problems they solved like this one ad. This is a common approach that spans most industries – the solution provider describes their business from their own value system, not from their consumers’ perspective.
Solution Approach
Given the obvious knowledge gap between the consumer and the service provider, the best solution would involve the service provider indicating what typical problems they solve, presented from the consumers’ perspective.
The difficulty with this approach is that it requires that the service providers understand the consumer’s perspective. Reviewing the user description for the service provider suggests that these folks are NOT savvy marketers and are not likely to be able to think in terms their average consumers’ perspective. What, then, can be done to bridge that knowledge gap, the gap between how the consumers think of their problem and what the service providers know about the appropriate solutions?
New Strategy
The best solution is for the Yellow Page publishers to re-orient themselves from serving as an advertising medium to acting as a marketing consultant that serves the interest of the advertiser. This requires a notable shift in thinking by the publisher. Instead of merely selling ad space, the publishers should reinvent themselves as knowledge providers.
The publisher is far more knowledgeable than the advertiser about how to attract consumers, yet does nothing to share or leverage that knowledge. By thinking of themselves as marketing consultants, the publisher could present templates for each of the various advertiser types (lawyer, dentist, roofer, plumber, etc.) to select specific problem types that they address for the consumers. Each ad would then resonate with a consumer’s perspective of their problem and help them better identify which “solution” (service provider) is more appropriate for their specific needs.
This is just one example of how a good user-experience perspective can change a product or even the business. Ask for your free analysis, today.
