A Sign of Extinction: What We Should Learn From the Yellow Pages

Sometimes in business we get so caught up in doing what works that we forget to stop and notice that it's not working anymore. 

About 2 weeks ago, a bunch of yellow page phone books were delivered to my condo building.  They come every year about this time.  Two weeks later, the same number of books are still sitting in the lobby of the building, in the exact same place where they appeared two weeks ago.

  Here they are, right where the delivery person left them.  I see them every day, and I count them every day, and not a single one has been claimed by a resident of my building.

Now it doesn't take a genius to know that yellow pages use has been on the decline since the onset of the Internet, and the rise of  search in particular.  But what astounds me is the fact that despite the declines in usage, thousands of businesses, year after year, continue to pump advertising dollars into an extinct medium.  What if all of those businesses woke up, looked in the lobby of my building and realized that no one is ever going to see their ad, let alone respond to it? 

Think of all of the other more creative and more effective ways those dollars could be deployed.  Of course, that would take effort. Finding a new way to drive business is harder than just repeating the old way, even if the old way isn't working. 

So, when you look at your business - probably an e-commerce business that's now about 10 years old, what's your version of the yellow pages?  What parts of your customer experience, your technology, your marketing spend or your operations are extinct, on auto pilot and not adding value anymore?  For those of you working the week between Xmas and New Year's, it's a great time to make a few trips to the recycle bin.   

Comments

[KenC]

The facts don't support your comments.

Those books you say you never use actually got referenced nearly 15 billion times last year. And that’s just the print versions. 90% of all adults reference them at least once a year, 75% in a typical month, and 50+% on average month. How about on average 1.4X each week?

The Internet is wonderful thing, but myth that it all we need doesn't hold water. The Wall Street Journal reported recently that the broadband market is about tapped out. There will always be a good percentage of the population that will never have access to the industry’s Internet products. Barely more than 50% of households in the U.S. (about 56 million homes), currently subscribe to a high-speed Internet service. An additional 21 million households still use dial-up connections (yes, you read that right – dial-up connections).

[Sally McKenzie]

Ken, thanks for the comments. I've seen similar stats, and I don't refute them - though it appears that none of those people using the books so frequently live in my building!
I think the bigger issue, and the one that I encourage businesses to think about, is whether or not they are actively tracking their results from yp (or any marketing activity), vs. simply writing a check every year because it's status quo. If the results are there for them, by all means they should be writing that check. My experience working with small businesses is that many of them don't track the results of their marketing spend, yet are afraid to pull away from something they've done for many years. Either that, or they do track, see declining results, yet, have failed to investigate and experiment with new marketing methods.

[Scott Wilson]

In some sectors, a yellow pages listing is essentially a requirement. I have a friend who's a mental health counselor who says the majority of her business comes from YP. OTOH, for computer related businesses, it seems to be an anachronism, so it's hard to make a universal case for or against the medium.

[Peter Kretzman]

OK, let me chime in with some (admittedly anecdotal) comments on YP usage.

I can't remember the last time I used a phone book at home. It was at least 7 years ago, because I've had broadband since about then. Phone books that get delivered to my house go instantly into recycling.

My sister, considerably less technically oriented to put it mildly, laughs at this when she visits, because we don't have phone books. She finds this fact somehow amusing, shocking, faintly scandalous. She lives in a rural town outside Kalamazoo, and can't get internet access other than through dial-up.

I haven't seen the WSJ article Ken references, but I have to just gut-level disagree with his assertion that "there will always be a good percentage of the population that will never have access to the industry’s Internet products." People probably said that sort of thing about the likely persistence of party lines for telephones, too.

Another example: there are 250 million mobile phones now in the US, a lot of them with some form of net access, and it will probably very soon be typical to find numbers via THAT version of "online" rather than search out a traditional phone book. Even my non-techie rural sister has a Blackberry. So I think Sally's points basically hold.