Ygrec
Claiming the colors and symbols of a century-old category
Ygrec was a regional, entrepreneurial business-directory publisher from Oradea, working in a category that had spent a hundred years delivering the same promise, essentially unchanged, to businesses across the world. The category was dominated by a competitor — Golden Pages / Pagini Aurii — so established that its name had become the generic word for the product, and it was coming under a threat larger than any competitor: internet search engines were beginning to question why a printed directory should exist at all. Inside the company, meanwhile, the business had grown faster than the organization built to run it. The decision Ygrec faced in 2007 was consequential: remain a regional directory merchant, or grow into a national publishing corporation — and make that ambition credible at the precise moment the category’s own future had come into doubt.
Brandient began with a full brand audit and strategy consultancy inside the company, and framed the engagement as a double transition: organizational, from entrepreneurial outfit to corporation, and strategic, from selling printed directories to building a national database-publishing business — one whose durable asset was the information itself, not the paper it was printed on.
The central branding decision was where to stand against a century of category codes. The conventional challenger move is to differentiate away from the incumbent’s colors and symbols. Brandient argued the opposite: when the leader’s name has gone generic, the category’s deep-rooted chromatic and symbolic codes belong to the category, not to the leader — and a serious challenger can claim them outright. The new corporate identity therefore took ownership of the colors and signs consumers already read as "directory," giving Ygrec instant legibility and legitimacy, while the redesign of the directories did the functional work the business lives or dies on: clear, well-structured, navigable information. In this category, usability is the product.
The directories — the publisher’s most visible brand vectors — carried the new identity to market, anchoring Ygrec inside its category as a serious, lasting business at the moment it most needed to look like one. The category’s verdict arrived soon enough: search engines hollowed out directory publishing worldwide. Ygrec outlived the shakeout — still in business in Oradea today, its directory extended into an online platform and business-information services, on the path named in the 2007 strategy.
Client:
Ygrec
Industry:
Professional Services
Project type:
Rebranding — Brand Upgrade
Date:
2007
Services:
Logo and Visual Identity Program
Communication Design
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