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Hi Boo - another unbelievably stupid re-brand

Many will remember how we had a short and extremely expensive (not for the brand ID people, who laughed all the way to Fred Shred's office) opportunity to purchase stamps and postal orders from Consignia, the suited, overpaid and underutilised powers that be having decided that to buy stamps and postal orders from a business called the Post Office was no longer sustainable.

These great people felt the consumer had become fed-up visiting a Post Office, and would much prefer to visit an infinitely superior-named Consignia Office instead. Although, despite its new name, the Consignia Office would continue to sell stamps and postal orders, but refuse point blank to sell any Consignias.

This lack of availability of Consignias for purchase by those members of the public wishing to purchase them from their local Consignia Offce, may go a long way to explain why the Consignia name lasted about 4 minutes before re-emerging from the howls of laughter and bucketloads of derision as the re-renamed Post Office.

Now Hibu is arriving. Or should I say Hibü, for those who can spell - or be bothered spelling it - by holding down the Alt key on their keyboard while typing 129 on their numerical pads to produce the ü with an umlaut above it. Those with a combined querty/numberpad, as is the case for many laptops and most netbooks, will be breaking the brand guidelines from the word go. As for smartphones and pad things........!

Back in May, the company chief executive of the newly proposed Hibü, Mike Pocock, admitted that the name was meaningless, although he did backtrack as quickly as he could to insist the word tells a story and the new 'soft-shouldered' edges of the logo (hurrah for the brand ID people again!) 'represents the people behind the identity' and that as a word, it is no more meaningless than Google or Yahoo when they were introduced.

Oh sorry! You asked what a Hib Alt+129 ü is.

It's going to be the soon to be former Yell. The little yellow finger that does the walking for Yellow Pages online. Yellow Pages itself won't be  renamed, but you'll no longer be using yell.com. You'll head for the more sensible Hibü, umlaut and all.

Do have a gander at the logo. The corporate ID peoples' palms must have no skin left from rubbing them together with glee (a teen television programme they were presumably able to watch in its entirety after their lengthy 3 minutes coming up with this new, all-singing, all-dancing, cutting-edge, truly-representative logo) when the saw Yell coming.

Unless I am misinformed and it has indeed been designed by a staff member's 8 year old.




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