Yellow Pages: Evolving with a changing marketplace

MANILA, Philippines - It is my good fortune to be leading the local stewardship of a powerful global brand: the Yellow Pages. In my youth, the brand was associated with the ubiquitous phone book. In those days, when you needed to find a product or service, you would normally be greeted by a familiar refrain: “Hanapin mo sa direktoryo.” And it worked!

Things aren’t quite as simple anymore. Nowadays, you have a vast array of goods and services and a broad range of commercial search options. If you’re looking for hardware, for example, you could simply go to a mall less than half an hour away from home. Or if you want to get your hands on a new or rare book, you could locate and order a copy online from halfway across the globe.

Has this vastly changed marketplace banished the Yellow Pages into oblivion? Quite the contrary. Consumers today may be more empowered because of the wealth of choices at their disposal, but their fundamental needs remain the same. A multiplicity of options can in fact be overwhelming, and many consumers desperately want to simplify their choices into the most appropriate, the most cost-efficient, the most strategic. On the other end, sellers want to be able to break through the clutter of choices to reach their buyers. This is where the Yellow Pages can help both buyers and sellers—particularly during these times when every peso counts. Indeed, the brand is reasserting itself in fresh and diverse ways all over the world. For starters, the Yellow Pages here and abroad can be accessed in print, online and mobile platforms.

Beyond these visible changes, however, it has been critical for our company to revisit the essence of our business. In marketing the Yellow Pages, we needed to go beyond the concept of being just a commercial directory or search engine and an advertising medium. We broke down our business to the basics to distil the true value that we bring to the marketplace.

That led us to articulate our mission in terms of marketplace development. Broadly defined, the marketplace encompasses every space—physical or virtual—where a seller and a potential buyer can meet and a product or service can be sold. Through the years, the Yellow Pages have brought buyers and sellers together through a time-tested commercial search experience. In doing so, we have helped the marketplace grow by leaps and bounds. The challenge before our company is to continue refreshing that experience in the age of high-speed, 24/7, global electronic and mobile connectivity.

Moving forward, we saw the need to innovate and thus stepped out of our comfort zone. Instead of focusing on how to sell more ad space or to entice wider usage of our products, we worked toward creating a newly relevant and compelling commercial search experience that can capture the imagination even of non-traditional Yellow Pages users and advertisers. This reconstructed and reinforced search experience is what I refer to as “YP 2.0”—the second generation of the Yellow Pages.

We recognize the Yellow Pages as our core product or service. But, this time, we are not confining it to multi-platform directory or advertising services. YP 2.0, as a total search experience, has to be defined from the vantage point of both the buyer seeking products and services and the seller searching for a critical mass of ready buyers from its distinct market segment/s. This encompasses all the intermediate and value-added services (VAS) that might be required to complete the search experience. 

Toward this end, we have been setting in place a number of VAS tools—from call center assistance to map location—that would make it possible to customize the search experience for specific buyers and sellers. Depending on the specific needs of a particular buyer or seller, therefore, YP 2.0 can feature any combination of the print, electronic and mobile platforms, in tandem with the relevant value-added service/s.

To sustain the relevance of the Yellow Pages to both buyers and sellers, we highlighted the need to connect our internal values with theirs. We are underscoring traits like “entrepreneurial” and “customer-centric” among DPC’s core values. This is where my temperament and instincts as an entrepreneur come in handy as I shepherd and refine the YP 2.0 vision. During my salad days, I never seemed to grow tired of making lako all sorts of products: from ballet shoes and silvanas to gelato and office lunches, sold in the style of the manglilibud, the food vendor who moved around my hometown of Silay in Negros. I even invented a local version of the game, Trivial Pursuits.

I relish the challenge of successfully selling a product, service or idea in the marketplace—testing the theories I learned in business school. An apostle of disruptive innovation, I constantly introduce new ideas—at times to the consternation of my management team. Fear of failure never intimidates me. Like I always say: how will you know if something would work or sell if you don’t try?

Finally, it is important to bear in mind that a vision is worthless unless everyone in the company shares it and strives to realize it. That’s why I prefer to look at my team not as officers and employees but as shareholders and co-owners who stand to reap the benefits of the company’s success.