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Two become one...
Page 15
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Take a stroll with us through the little side roads of haulage — the diversions and detours, the quirky, the quioxotic, and the downright strange...
Branding is important — just ask a cow. The sizzle of hot metal on bovine flesh is enough to bring a tear to even our heartless meat-eating eyes, so pity then the poor employees of DHL or Securicor Express/Logistics as the firms come together slowly like two mating sloths and undergo a long period of rebranding.
You see it's all down to image. They've been one company for a wee while now but there remains a sea of little blue trucks and vans on the roads, complete with Securicor Omega livery, which is a tad confusing for anyone looking to promote the company as a whole. So sadly we'll soon be seeing the end of those trucks in their delicate shade of aquamarine — a colour more usually favoured by Barclays Bank or the manufacturers of truck cab interiors (although quite who wants to wake up with turquoise light playing on their face is rather beyond us).
In their place come vehicles in a rather jaunty shade of yellow, reminiscent to us of Birds custard or perhaps Coleman's Mustard, which is far less easy on the eye, but is nevertheless DHL corporate colours (we're hoping that drivers end up with bright yellow jumpsuits to work in too) allowing them to deliver a cohesive corporate whole, or some such management drivel.
Unfortunately it's all too easy for all their hard work to be undone by external forces like a ball of string under a kitten's paws. At a recent FTA London-related shindig we were grasped warmly by the hand by a man announcing himself as an employee of DHL Express. Sadly the man's lapel badge, provided by the FTA, labelled him as still working for Securicor. Now where's that red-hot poker?
You could tell it was a London event mind. Firstly it was held in a room full of bright red London buses and secondly the accents were a dead give-away.
It's not big and it's not clever we know, but we had to suppress a giggle when Securicor's (no, the other Securicor) Steve Bennett took to the stage and began to punctuate every sentence with a terse "right" in that semi-threatening way that London folk use when they're hectoring you. It began to sound a little, well, cockney geezer after a while.
"Parking fines are colossal, right? I'm not saying there shouldn't be fines, right, but we want to work with all the bodies and improve how we can get deliveries to the shops, right? Or, tell you what sunshine, I'll be round to persuade you and it won't be pretty, right?" as he may not entirely have said.
Right, we're off for pie and eels down the rub-a-dub.