Red and green should never be seen

File this under "What on earth were they thinking?"

The last couple of months witnessed the demise of one of the old bastions of the British high street, the consumer electronics store Dixons. The company itself is still alive, as are a goodly number of its premises, but the Dixons name has been vanquished to the nether regions of the internet in yet another pointless rebranding exercise.

I have little truck with rebranding. Shakespeare was right - a rose by any other name would indeed smell as sweet, so why, oh why do boardrooms across the world so frequently fail to recognise this simple truth? And more importantly, why do they fail to recognise its corollary, that sewage by any other name smells as foul? Instead the public are treated as gullible fools, easily impressed by a nothing more than change of window dressing.

Despite my protestations, I suppose there is a point to it. Marketing works, as the countless billions of pounds and dollars spent in that industry each year attest, and even I can recognise that the Dixons logo and general image were rooted somewhere in the increasingly distant past, which is not a good place to be when trying to flog cutting edge technology. But if you're going to go through this whole exercise, shouldn't the first step involve the creation of a brand that's actually superior to that which it's replacing?

Currys.digital, as the Dixons of old is now known, not only hearkens back to the great dot com bubble 'n bust in name (period's are so passé, darling) , but the new logo features one of the worst colour schemes I've encountered involving white and vomitous fluorescent green text on a fire engine red background. Not only is it remarkably similar to the Dixons logo of old (well, with the addition of some hideous green text), not only does it just look plain nasty, but it's the colour scheme is actually hard to read. Who approved this? Really, I want to know. This is a person whose career is worth tracking, if only to make sure I can offer advice to sell shares in whichever company they take over.

Marketing. Just say no kids.