What were they thinking? Was anyone thinking?
“In a moment of madness, or great strategic vision, depending on your point of view, the CEO of a previously strait-laced company listed on the FTSE 250 changed its name to widespread ridicule,” says Mike Rigby of MRA Research. “Four years of poor results later, a new CEO changed it back again.”
On 4th March 2025 the fund manager abrdn announced it would trade again as aberdeen, after a four-year corporate car crash following a much-ridiculed rebranding when it changed its name from Standard Life Aberdeen to abrdn. CEO, Stephen Bird said the name signified a ‘modern, agile, digitally enabled brand’.
That’s what he and the board hoped, but it wasn’t what investors and the media thought. ‘Hw cn brnds sty cl? Nt by drppng vwls’ said one of Britain’s biggest investment firms. Some said abrdn looked like a typo; others joked the firm had ‘irritable vowel syndrome’.
The mockery stung the company into complaining against unfair criticism and bullying from the media and commentators. That just turned up the volume. The Financial Times mocked: ‘Lv abrdn aln’ (Leave Aberdeen alone), while City AM ran the front page headline: ‘Abrdn: an apology – sry we kp tking th pss ot of yr vwls.’
When it was announced the CEO was leaving someone quipped on LinkedIn ‘Srrry yr lvng.’
During this period of ‘corporate insanity’, the 200-year-old company was getting bad headline after bad headline. Value was destroyed on a huge scale and abrdn was twice ejected from the FTSE 250!
The announcement to replace the vowels in abrdn and change the name back to Aberdeen – the fourth name change in eight years as the brand evolved from a merger between Standard Life and Aberdeen Asset Management – came only weeks after the new CEO Jason Windsor said: “The name is the name; we’re continuing with it.”
Aberdeen’s not an outlier. Companies, large and small, lose the plot every so often and confuse and lose investors and customers with silly rebrands eg Royal Mail to Consignia in 2002, and Twitter to X.
But what were they thinking? The CEO may have had a rush of blood to the head, but what was the chairman thinking, what were the non-executive directors thinking? Was anyone thinking?
They say that success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. A week after aberdeen group announced its U turn, branding consultancy Wolf Olins, which had ‘been drafted in to help with the original rebrand’ apparently urged the CEO not to switch to abrdn ‘according to three people from the consultancy who were familiar with the process’. Wolf Olins asked abrdn to make clear in its marketing that the consultancy, part of the Omnicom Group, was not responsible for coming up with the name. Four years too late? Two of the three insiders also recalled that the name abrdn did not test well in the research when it was trialled.
Can high profile marketing decisions like this be unfortunate one-offs? Safely quarantined from operations, commercial and financial functions? With a separate culture protecting the rest of the company from a CEO’s iron will or flight of fancy? Or is it reasonable to assume that a compliant, inattentive chair and board will nod through other value destroying proposals without common sense scrutiny?
This article was first published in the Builders Merchants News magazine.
