I Yodel, You Yodel, We All Yodel for Yodel

This past May, the UK’s largest home delivery service for packages, Home Delivery Network (HDN), purchased the UK domestic parcel delivery business of DHL Express, which focuses on business-to-business service, to become the second largest delivery service in the UK after the Royal Mail. HDN already has contracts to deliver products sold by Amazon as well as one of the most powerful catalog and online retailers in the UK, Argos. With the purchase of DHL Express, HDN announced that it will be changing its name to Yodel — derived from a few letters of its tagline ” Yo ur del ivery, your call.” The naming and identity were created by London-based The Clearing

This past May, the UK’s largest home delivery service for packages, Home Delivery Network (HDN), purchased the UK domestic parcel delivery business of DHL Express, which focuses on business-to-business service, to become the second largest delivery service in the UK after the Royal Mail. HDN already has contracts to deliver products sold by Amazon as well as one of the most powerful catalog and online retailers in the UK, Argos. With the purchase of DHL Express, HDN announced that it will be changing its name to Yodel — derived from a few letters of its tagline “Your delivery, your call.” The naming and identity were created by London-based The Clearing.

Yodel

We defined the brand promise as ‘Take it personally’ to reflect the determination and dedication of everyone within the business to deliver exactly what customers wanted — including tailoring service for individual clients. This turned the industry convention on its head, focusing the promise on people and service rather than purely functional operations.

We created the name Yodel by building on the brand promise and thinking about the service from the perspective of both business and home customers: ‘it’s your delivery’. So Yodel comes directly from the words ‘YOur DELivery’. And because the service is tailored for customers, it’s their call how it works — which perfectly resolves the name.

The name is highly differentiated within the sector — which is flooded with three-letter acronyms and descriptive names. And the personality of the brand overall avoids the usual speed/direction clich?s of delivery firms.
— The Clearing project page

The new name is actually quite clever and I really appreciate that it wasn’t just picked because it sounds cool and yodeling is groovy in an ironic kind of way. An explanation is just a stone’s throw away and to a certain degree it works like the FedEx arrow, where it might take an observant consumer a few moments to make the connection between the name and the tagline. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for the visual identity, which lacks any surprise or innovation and simply rides the geometric sans serif with bright colors bandwagon. It’s a simple and solid execution but falls way short of making a memorable impact — although I imagine those bright green vans crowding the streets will in the same way the brown trucks of UPS do.

Yodel