05-03-2025
Customers don't want pointless rebrands, they want decent service
The 'crprt ctstrph', or for those of us who still cling to the old-fashioned notion of keeping the vowels in sentences, the 'corporate catastrophe', is finally over. The asset management giant Aberdeen has decided to restore its 200-year-old name after it rebranded itself as Abrdn in one of the most widely mocked image overhauls of all time.
It is a welcome return of traditional values. But it is something else as well – a return to common sense and a defeat for a self-indulgent managerial class that ignored customer service, and returns for investors, in favour of a faddish modernity that did nothing for anyone. If it was meant to modernise the business it was not a great success. Four years ago, Aberdeen, heir to a long tradition of high-quality Scottish financial services, rebranded itself as 'Abdrn'. Even amid some stiff competition for the silliest corporate rebrand of all time, this one was right up there with the very worst of all time.
Stripping out the vowels from its name simply left an unpronounceable word soup that meant nothing to anyone. It was so widely mocked that the firm's chief investment officer, Peter Branner, was last year reduced to whinging about 'corporate bullying ' (or presumably 'crprt bllng'), as if the firm was being victimised for a disability instead of rightly criticised for a stupid decision.
This week, it has finally decided to restore the vowels to their right and proper place. Its new CEO John Windsor, who took over the top job back in December, conceded that the rebrand had been a 'distraction ', which is putting it mildly, and that the company would go back to its old name, spelt correctly. It is hard to see how it had much choice about that.
If the removal of the vowels was meant to turn it into a slick, high-powered money machine, it hadn't worked. The share price has fallen by 33 per cent over the last five years, while rivals such as M&G were up by 12 per cent. Savers were not rushing to put their money into a dynamic, forward looking asset manager. Instead, they started to suspect the company was run by people who were slightly weird, and a bit dim, and those are hardly the qualities you are looking for in someone who is looking after your pension or ISA.
It would be very easy to mock. Indeed, it should probably be compulsory. Making fun of corporations is one of the best ways of keeping them under control, and stopping them from becoming too arrogant. And yet, the return of Aberdeen's proper name is emblematic of something bigger and more important than just the restoration of the correct spelling, as important as that is.
In reality, the rebrand was the peak of a period of corporate self-indulgence. It was sadly typical of a managerial class that trashed the history for their own organisations, and was more interested in appearances than actual results. It came from the same mindset that gave us endless governance codes, that devoted huge amounts of time to ' unconscious bias' training sessions, that made diverse pronouns compulsory on email and name-badges, that debanked any one whose views it did not approve of, that took a fashionable stance on every passing cause, and that flaunted their woke progressivism at every opportunity they could.
Of course, customers never cared about any of that stuff, and nor did shareholders. They just wanted businesses to deliver a decent product at a fair price. Who knows, perhaps bringing the vowels back could be the start of bringing back plenty of other common sense ideas, like working from the office most days of the week, hiring people on merit and prioritising profits over social activism. If so, many companies might find their performance has started to improve. One point is certain. Now that it has been consigned to history, the Abrdn name won't be mssd.
