Business

Why brands ditching vowels are rlly stpd

Standard Life Aberdeen’s rebrand made it a laughing stock. It’s only mistake was acting like a startup

The headlines practically wrote themselves when staid Edinburgh fund manager Standard Life Aberdeen revealed its new identity — abrdn — last week. “Too cool for schl?” was The Guardian’s take on the company’s newfound lack of vowels. The Wall Street Journal asked “Who Nds th Lttr E?” and the Financial Times renamed its daily mailshot “Aalphaaviillee”, pushing readers towards a piece questioning whether Standard Life Aberdeen had been “disemvoweled”.

It is hardly the reaction the company, formed via the 2017 merger of pensions giant Standard Life and investment house Aberdeen Asset Management, was after. Its CEO Stephen Bird was, after all, convinced he was unveiling a “modern, dynamic and, most importantly, engaging” brand that would bring “clarity of focus” and “create unity across the business”. Becoming a national laughing stock was not part of the plan.

The problem, according to Stewart Steel, strategy director at brand consultancy Good, is that Standard Life Aberdeen offered up the new name as proof that it is now a “digitally enabled” business without bothering to explain what that actually means. The result, he says, is that rather than presenting itself as a modern organisation with a clear vision for growth, Standard Life Aberdeen has come off as a stuffy fund manager that is trying too hard to get down with the digital kids.

“They posted a note to the stock market saying, ‘We’re going to be digital now’, but a brand is a tool to help customers pick the right product and I’m looking at this and saying how are you changing,” he says. “This is only skin deep. It’s ‘Daddy’s got a new girlfriend and check out my Ferrari and I’ve always been called Andrew but now you can call me Andy’.”

Or, as Peter Matthews, managing director of digital brand consultancy Nucleus, puts it: “Rebranding a middle of the road asset manager for the TikTok generation is full of risk, as I doubt that’s their target market, and already everyone in the City is linking their funds’ poor performance to the literal phonetic pronunciation ‘a burden’.”

A brand encompasses much more than just a name, but what a business chooses to call itself - particularly if it creates a backlash - is important. Standard Life Aberdeen seemingly failed to grasp that. Though it splashed out on big-name brand consultancy Wolff Olins - whose other clients include Google, TikTok and Uber - to create its new identity, its budget did not stretch to letting the experts choose its new name. Wolff Olins global CEO Sairah Ashman stresses that the fund house “had already developed a name to work with” before her team was brought on board. An anagram of ‘brand’ presumably would not have been top of that team’s list.

Standard Life Aberdeen has seen billions of pounds exit of its funds since its merger in 2017. For a financial firm desperate to attract young investors to help stem that tide, it is easy to see why it might have thought abrdn would be a good option. To the buttoned-up traditionalists of the Edinburgh financial sector, messing with a few vowels may be beyond the pale, but the start-ups of the Scottish fintech world are unencumbered by such conventions. Appii, Guiide, Modulr and Swipii are among the new financial businesses to pop up in recent years, while the ambiguously named Bemo, biggles at large and Xi have been incubated within Edinburgh’s vibrant tech ecosystem. Lined up next to them, abrdn hardly looks out of place.

The names of these businesses may be unique, but the thinking behind them is not. Start-up land is full of quirky named outfits such as e-commerce platform OOOOO, cookie-dough firm Doughp and video-chat enhancer mmhmm. Caroline Wiertz, a professor of marketing at the City, University of London business school formerly known as Cass, says such monikers are not as absurd as they might seem.

“People don’t pick wacky names just to be wacky,” she says. “If you are a start-up and you don’t quite know yet what you’re going to be you want a name that’s abstract and allows you to do all sorts of things. GetTaxi changed its name to Gett; being called taxi could be quite limiting. You never know where the tech will take you.”

The difference for established businesses, Wiertz says, is that they have to have reasons for rebranding and be able to relay them in a clear and reasoned way. Take her own employer. Until last summer, the City, University of London Business School was known as Cass Business School, but the name was dropped with immediate effect after its namesake Sir John Cass’s links to slavery were revealed. Weirtz led a consultation to come up with a new name for the school and, as of September, it will rebrand as Bayes Business School in honour of the nonconformist theologian and mathematician Thomas Bayes.

“Bayes was suggested many times,” Wiertz says. “The reason is that his theorem about conditional probability is influential for many things [relevant to the business school] such as machine learning and AI. He’s also buried in Bunhill Fields so is kind of a neighbour.”

Standard Life Aberdeen says a “full stakeholder engagement plan” on its own rebranding will be rolled out over the course of this year. Beyond the business trying to be ‘digital’ while also maintaining links to its historical roots, it is therefore not entirely clear if there was any shareholder or fundholder backing for abrdn. Despite that, Matthews says there is one particularly good reason for it making that choice: “It must have been a breeze to trade mark and register domains.”

In the internet age it has never been easier to trade on the back of someone else’s success and so it has never been more important for businesses to protect their IP. Various trade marks containing the word Aberdeen have already been registered at the UK Intellectual Property Office; ABRDN, which was registered in March, is unique. For a business that has suffered an identity crisis due to its trading names including Standard Life Aberdeen and Aberdeen Standard Investments the simplicity that brings from both a marketing and brand-protection perspective is key.

Indeed, the organisation’s global head of brand management, Simon Bailey, says that having “a single brand architecture” will allow it to “optimise the marketing investment that we make”. But that is where the biggest challenge to the new brand will lie.

Steel says that “in five days no one will care about the name” Standard Life Aberdeen has chosen to move forward with. Wiertz agrees, noting that in a branding context a name is “just an empty vessel that you fill with content”. “Apple is a terrible name for a tech company but it’s a great brand,” she says. “You know what they stand for so the name is not a problem. It will be the same for abrdn if they do a good job marketing it.”

In that respect, the reaction to abrdn is the least of the fund manager’s problems. AJ Bell financial analyst Laith Khalaf notes that the business “has some excellent funds”, but it has some rotten ones too. The only way it can stem outflows from the rotten ones is to turn their performance around — and that’s not something that dropping a few vowels can help it achieve.

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This article was originally published by WIRED UK