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Company naming snafu: Consignia name--plus mass layoffs--brings brand identity to the streets.

LONDON, Apr. 11, 2002. According to a story in New York Times, the parent company for the British post office, Post Office Group, that changed its name to Consignia last year, is now suffering painful withdrawal symptoms from this severe case of morpheme addiction.

Everyone, it seems, from the chairman of the company to all of its workers to the general public hates the new name, while losses and layoffs continue to mount.

The new name - a derivative of consign, meaning to deliver or entrust - has become a public relations nightmare, symbolizing the deficiencies that have made the postal system a close second to the railways as a source of national embarrassment.

Why do companies keep saddling themselves with horrible, anonymous morphemic monikers? Usually, as in this case, it's pushed through by the legal department as the easiest type of name to trademark:

Sticking with the name Post Office for the holding company was impossible, they said, given the difficulty in obtaining a global copyright, a necessary step to expanding abroad and keeping pace with rivals like Deutsche Post and TPG of the Netherlands.

Millions of people now want to change the name back, or to something else, but the company cannot afford to, so they're stuck with Consignia. But the name is so reviled that William Hayes, the general secretary of the 300,000-member Communications Workers Union, is urging its members to boycott the name and to use the name "Post Office" instead. "We think the name is daft," he said.

[Isn't Daft a wood stain? Oh, that's Deft....It's a beautiful thing, the English language, where changing one letter in a word can change the meaning from quick and skillful to mad, crazy, foolish or stupid.]

Addendum and dummer: Renaming the Post Office Consignia happened during the Internet boom when Britain also embarked on a campaign to rid itself of those wonderful red phone booths because "studies had shown" that it gave them a low-tech image. They were trying to attract the big Internet bucks, so the red booths got yanked in favor of the Americano models that had singlehandedly made the U.S. such a high-tech economic powerhouse. And the 'Net bounty that would be Britain's reward for this crimson harvest? London phone booths for $899 on ebay.