abrdn, the oft-pilloried, disemvowelled rebrand of the company formerly known as Aberdeen Asset Management, the largest active asset manager in the UK, has announced another rebrand – back to Aberdeen, or aberdeen group plc to give it its full new title.
In the company’s latest results, published today, CEO Jason Windsor, who joined the company last September said: “We are announcing today that we will change the Company’s name to aberdeen group plc. We do not intend to make any changes to our subsidiary legal entity names or the names of our underlying funds (including the CUSIPs or ISINs) at this time, and our LSE ticker will remain ABDN. We will now start to use “aberdeen” as the principal trading identity for our Investments and Adviser businesses.”
The ‘abrdn’ rebrand took place in April 2021 after the company, at that point known as Standard Life Aberdeen, sold the Standard Life Insurance business to Phoenix. The new brand, still pronounced “Aberdeen” and developed by branding agency Wolff Olins, came in for immediate criticism.
Jonathan Gabay, a brand expert quizzed by The Guardian about the move at the time said: “This is ill thought-out, it could be pronounced ‘a burden’. They are a financial company. What they do for customers is look at details, getting rid of vowels and letters makes it look like they’ve skipped over the most basic details in their name.”
Laith Khalaf, a financial analyst at Manchester-based investment firm AJ Bell agreed: “Investors need simple fund names that are recognisable among the thousands of investments that are out there.
“The fact that Standard Life Aberdeen has actually had to explain how to pronounce the new name won’t be lost on financial advisers up and down the country, whose clients may well think they’ve punched a typo into a hastily written report.”
abrdn’s chief executive at the time, Stephen Bird, insisted the name reflected a “clarity of focus” however, and was “modern, dynamic and, most importantly, engaging for all of our client and customer channels.”
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In fairness to abrdn and its branding gurus, a further part of the reason for the post-Standard Life abrdn rebrand was reportedly that the domain ‘aberdeen.com’ was already in use. That defence didn’t prevent the rebrand from being judged as an “act of corporate insanity” in an online poll of investors by online comparison website Investing Reviews, and dubbed “the biggest branding misfire of 2021” by Creative Bloq.
Just last April, abrdn’s chief investment officer Peter Branner accused the media of being “childish” for ridiculing the name and said in an interview with trade mag Finance News that the company was a victim of “corporate bullying.”
Nonetheless, childish bullying or not, with a new man at the top abrdn is no more and its the truncated investor is already but a distant memory on social media. Although Windsor’s comments don’t give too much away about the exact reasons for the re-rebrand, it probably wouldn’t be assuming too much to suspect that the widespread revulsion, occasional hilarity, and frequent mocking inspired by the abrdn moniker may have had at least some role to play: All hail aberdeen group plc.
