Recent weeks have brought multiple examples of companies reversing course — on diversity policy, green energy targets and flexible working — as the corporate world adapts, sometimes shamelessly and self-interestedly, to the fast-changing political landscape. Now, at last, comes a corporate policy reversal that many will endorse. Abrdn, the UK fund manager, said this week it was rebranding as Aberdeen. Less than four years after it switched to a “modern, agile, digitally enabled brand” made up mostly of consonants, the group is Making AEIOU Great Again.
The U-turn, or what Aberdeen might until this week have called the “trn”, is long overdue. As the Financial Times wrote in 2021, “Thr s smthng t b sd fr vwls”, or “there is something to be said for vowels”.
At the time, general media derision for the rebadging was so great that Abrdn’s chief investment officer complained about “corporate bullying”. In fairness, Standard Life Aberdeen, as it used to be known, had to change its name because the Standard Life brand had been sold. While Abrdn looked absurd, holdouts could, and did, continue to pronounce it like the Scottish city where the company has its roots. The group’s claim that the vowel-free name would provide a unifying identity, better than the five brands under which it previously traded, had some merit.
Indeed, as recently as January, Aberdeen’s chief executive, Jason Windsor, who took over the job last year, was defending his company’s old name. Perhaps he has since become tired of being asked about it and has decided the inevitable cost of changing back is a small price to pay. Or possibly he feared a re-rebrand would for ever put Abrdn in the same hall of name-shame as Consignia, the brand foisted in 2001 on the company that owned the UK’s Royal Mail — whose history goes back 500 years — and Post Office, until it was abandoned less than two years later. Then there was tronc, the shortlived brand under which Tribune Publishing, owner of the Chicago Tribune, traded from 2016 to 2018 before seeing reason.
Windsor would be better thinking of his company as part of the vanguard in a welcome trend away from corporate branding absurdities.
Mobile telephony company EE, now part of BT, was first called Everything Everywhere. PwC was known by the unfeasibly cumbersome tag of PricewaterhouseCoopers for a period, including the moment of madness in 2002 when it rebranded its own consulting arm as Monday. The operation was sold to IBM before the name change could take full effect. WeightWatchers struggles on within its unhappily renamed parent WW. But the consumer goods company RB — short for Reckitt Benckiser — is back to calling itself Reckitt.
Given the pace at which companies are reverting to their old ways, it may only be a matter of time before a few start to choose names that actually explain what they do.
Nobody has yet suggested Aberdeen should revert to calling itself the North of Scotland Canadian Mortgage Company, one of the 19th-century entities from which it is descended. But that organisation did at least “do what it said on the tin”, providing finance for Scottish expats farming the Canadian prairies. So come back, British Telecommunications and International Business Machines (if not The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, as IBM was once known), all is forgiven.
The next step for Aberdeen in its gradual return from the wacky fringes of brand innovation is clear. Despite seeing sense over vowels, it has stuck with brand gurus’ obsession with the lower case, insisting that the “new” name should be written “aberdeen”. Roll on the fund manager’s recapitalisation.