Say Hello Hibu, Yell Goodbye
29th May 2012
So Yell has decided to rebrand, a profound decision confirming that the existing brand is universally tainted and unloved.
Alongside an announcement that they've lost 1.7 billion quid over the last year, they've decided to re-name the web part of the whole sorry affair as Hibu. That's pronounced High Boo. Even Chief Executive Mike Pocock admits he does not know what the word is supposed to mean, but it's being spun as being 'accessible to the digital generation'. So there. Personally I reckon expectations will be HIGH but results will be BOO.
No wonder they don't want to be Yell anymore - I've lost count of the number of clients telling me of hassles and tussles with their peculiar method of selling and publishing websites.
The old hard sell may have softened a bit lately and it seems the sales team do keep repeating the word 'Google' an awful lot, implying to the uninitiated that if you don't join Yell then Google will drop you from their search results.
Well hey-ho, what a turnup. As any website owner knows, if you change your domain name then you effectively have to start from scratch with Google, so who knows how long it will be before www.hibu.com will deliver the decent backlinks that Yell currently does?
So by changing their name they acheive three remarkable things:
- By implication they admit Yell is tainted
- By choosing a non-word for the new name they show a hopeless yearning to be trendy
- By changing their domain they lose the only tangible benefit current customers get
I am told that Hibu means 'Leaking money no future' in Klingon.