Metropol

New store opening in Hull tomorrow called Discount UK. Their delivery vans are Poundworld ones, so I wonder if Poundworld will eventually drop the everything £1 model and convert the stores to the Dioscount UK name?

www.discountuk.com

Discount UK and Poundworld are planned to expand together.

Poundworld itself was the subject of Undercover Boss on Tuesday. Some very very shark-like practices, including making staff responsible for their till losses and docking 2 hours for failing to clock in. The "problem" necessitating their appearance on the programme was their inability to retain staff, with a churn of 25%. The programme then spent the entire time pretty much ignoring the fact they only pay minimum wage and not a penny more, and then subtract from that!

At the end, the "boss" concluded they couldn't up the wage as that's the nature of the business, but sent a handful of employees on holidays. Woo-bloody-hoo.

JAS84 wrote:New store opening in Hull tomorrow called Discount UK. Their delivery vans are Poundworld ones, so I wonder if Poundworld will eventually drop the everything £1 model and convert the stores to the Dioscount UK name?

http://www.discountuk.com

99p stores were supposed to launch as 'Family Bargains' here in Redditch but obviously it hadn't worked that well as where in the country as they eventually opened as 99p stores.

I don't think the Poundland expansion into Ireland has been mentioned on here, for obvious reasons the brand will not be Poundland or Euroland but Dealz, one wonders whether the stores will take exactly the same format and be fixed price, surprised they didn't go with the name Dealland or similar to keep it in line with the UK brand.

Didn't realise until I read this thread that Poundworld and Discount UK were the same company, we've had a Discount UK for about 6 months on a retail park in Warrington, went in there today and stocked up on soft drinks (on a long car journey tomorrow) and was pleasantly surprised, looks better than Poundworld dare I say it.

nwtv2003 wrote:Didn't realise until I read this thread that Poundworld and Discount UK were the same company, we've had a Discount UK for about 6 months on a retail park in Warrington, went in there today and stocked up on soft drinks (on a long car journey tomorrow) and was pleasantly surprised, looks better than Poundworld dare I say it.

Six months? Then why on earth does the Discount UK website just have a logo and "COMING SOON" on it, and the Poundworld website make no mention of Discount UK? I'd assumed Discount UK was a totally new brand and that Hull was the first branch under that name.

My old stomping ground, Plymouth Uni, has just undergone a rebrand and change of name. They are no longer 'The University of Plymouth' but are now 'Plymouth University'.

Their old logo had survived (albeit with a slight facelift in 2002) for almost 20 years from 1992 when they became a university up until recent weeks when the branding went live. It's roots date back even further than that - it's actual a small part of the defunct Polytechnic South West logo from the 1980's.

I often deride modern branding for being devoid of any actual iconic graphic deisgn and simply being text in a pre-existing font which could be knocked up in Word in 10 seconds, but this time there isn't even that. The 'brand' consists of a series of taglines 'Enterprise with Plymouth University', 'Research with Plymouth University', 'Study with Plymouth Unviersity' etc but there is no actual 'Plymouth University' corporate logo at all.

Despite this, the replacement brand (by some outfit called 'Buddy and Here') apparently took 18 months to develop and initial costs for the design work were £90,000. Lets now see how long it takes them to replace all the signeage...when I left in 2006 there were still brand new documents being produced with the 1992 rather than 2002 version of the logo, and there are plenty of buildings with 1992 signs on which were never replaced.

http://www.designweek.co.uk/buddy-and-h ... 68.article

Whilst on the subject of educational establishments, in near by Longbridge a new multi-million pound campus of Bournville College has just opened on the former MG Rover site.



This was their old logo.



But I really like how they've incorporated the shape of their new build into the college's new logo.

Whilst walking, I saw a British Gas van, however the big difference was a new logo.

http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/sect ... -identity/

The current logo looks better in my opinion. I don't know why but I feel the new British Gas logo reminds me of the new-ish 'N Power' logo.

I wrote:Lets now see how long it takes them to replace all the signeage...when I left in 2006 there were still brand new documents being produced with the 1992 rather than 2002 version of the logo, and there are plenty of buildings with 1992 signs on which were never replaced.

They've quite quickly got around the issue of how to display your logo on a building when you don't actually have a logo any more; all major exterior signeage has been removed. Not replaced...just removed.

In a time when the university is in debt due to their relentless and somewhat misguided building programme (made worse through Levinksy's campus closure programme) which hasn't stopped in over 10 years and when they are under fire for charging the new maximum fees straight away from 2012, it's surely the worst time possible to spend so much money on such weak branding which is doubtless doomed to have a very short existance.

That new British Gas logo looks a bit cold, harsh and slightly sinister compared to the soon-to-be-phased-out one. Mind you, it's probably better suited to the company for exactly those reasons.

I wonder when we'll start to see the Scottish Gas variant. Always puzzled me why they retain this trading name up here.