Say Hi, Boo!

Britain’s Yell Group, which publishes Yellow Pages directories but prefers to call itself “a leading provider of digital services within the emerging local eMarketplace for consumers and SMEs”—aren’t you glad you asked?—will henceforth be known as Hibu.

 

 

The name was developed by global branding giant Landor after a five-month exploration. What does it mean? Nothing.

Here’s how the Telegraph reported the news:

Mike Pocock, chief executive, said the company needed to find a new name because it was “viewed as a dinosaur”, but admitted that hibu was “just a word” with no real meaning.

“Don’t read anything into it...It doesn’t have any pure meaning behind it,” he said. “It needed to be short, easy to pronounce and to sound edgy and innovative. It doesn’t mean a lot by itself, but if you turn the clock back, neither did Apple [sic] and Google or Yahoo!”

Or, say, Hulu.

As Yell Group, the company had a clever if vestigial linguistic connection to “Yellow.” It also had a lot of debt. It undertook the rebranding, Pocock told the Evening Standard, because “Yell had low awareness online, especially among those aged under 35.”

Hibu—the company prefers to spell it with all lower-case letters, but they aren’t the boss of me—is pronounced “high-boo.” Despite the don’t-read-anything-into-it directive, the marketing department has labored mightily to do exactly the opposite. This is from the Our New Brand page of the corporate website:

What’s the thinking behind the brand identity?
In addition to being consumer oriented and a symbol in its own right, we wanted our identity to tell a story. We have developed a new positioning for the organisation – ‘connecting communities’. Communities are built on the connections people make and people are connected at the heart of the hibu logo. The identity utilises typography with soft shouldered edges like the human body and coloured dots represent the people behind the identity, diversity, connections and conversation. By using bold lower case typography with soft edges we project a human and approachable company.

Aha—dots are people! And here I was reading it as yet another happy smiley umlaut.

UPDATE: Twitter friend Ian Preston notes that in French, hibou (ee-boo) means “owl.”

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Thanks to Benjamin Lukoff of the American Name Society email list for the tip.

Comments

[Tom Albrighton]

Apple expresses simplicity, accessibility and (in the context of IT) 'differentness', which were Apple values from the outset.

Google is a version of Googol (a very big number) and alludes to the amount of information on the Internet.

Yahoo means nothing but I wouldn't draw any comfort from a comparison with them, however favourable.

Yellow Pages was a great brand that meant something and keyed into physical recognisability (the printed directory).

Yell! is a play on the idea of calling for something that's kind of clever but ultimately a bit lame.

Hibu feels like a throwback to the era of names like Digg, but the hip sites these days are called things like Instagram.

I wish we could do without that sort of 'brand story'. Do customers care? It's really just an indulgent self-justification aimed at other marketing pros.

Nice post by the way.

[Mwncïod]

I look at "hibü" and it makes me think of French owls (hibou) and Welsh "hybu": ...cynllun newydd i hybu "hibü" - a new scheme to promote "hibü".

[Nancy Friedman]

@Tom: The founders of Yahoo, Jerry Yang and David Filo, used to say that Yahoo was an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle but that (according to Yahoo's media-relations page) "they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: 'rude, unsophisticated, uncouth'." http://docs.yahoo.com/info/misc/history.html

And Apple was, of course, the name of the Beatles' record company before it was the name of a computer company. After Steve Jobs entered the music business via iTunes, the original Apple hit the upstart with many lawsuits.