Irritable vowel syndrome
Without doubt the 2021 rebrand, by Wolff Olins, was bold. It communicated transformational change to the 200-year old institution whose reputation was hardly cutting-edge, with under-performing funds and a conservative fuddy-duddy image. The reason it failed - forecast in Wired at the time - was that the rebrand set expectations that were impossible for the business to fulfil and so generated all-round approbrium from customers, industry insiders and outsiders because promise and reality never met up.
Its many critics saw the rebranding as superficial, divorced from reality with the selective “disemvowelling” (only ‘e’s deleted) was therefore seen as a gimmick. Had the business executed a radical repositioning and transformed its proposition and performance, the bold brand solution might have worked. It didn’t and the gap between ‘cool brand’ and ‘tired proposition’ never closed. The CEO accused detractors of “corporate bullying” and now you can’t even find the case study amongst the many successful ones on the Wolff Olins website…
Turning back the tide
So a new CEO and another rebrand. “Re-emvowelling” Aberdeen was a pragmatic way of silencing the critics and a 9% jump in its share price seems to corroborate this. But really? Is every “e’ worth 3%, or is something else going on?
Every brand consultant knows a new CEO is an opportunity for a rebrand. New broom, new brand as a simple identifier of when the business was “under my watch”. But maybe this is a case of dialling down expectations for a business that is never going to set the world on fire. Being conservative as a fund manager is not a bad thing when you are managing peoples’ pensions and, maybe, this move just realigned stakeholders’ expectations of the business as a solid, old-established Scottish money manager.
The trouble is, this re-rebrand has not been planned or executed well. Using the same expanded font means the Aberdeen word mark is now quite extended when the initial ‘a’ motif is included, and, as I write, the legal name is stil abrdn plc, stock market ticker the same, website url remains abrdn.com, the meta data on the website still refers to abrdn and no new trade marks have been filed to protect the new name, even for a figurative mark. Aberdeen.com is owned by someone who is not going to part with it cheaply and aberdeenassetmanagement.com is a 23 letter url. Not attending to these details is branding 101-stuff. This should have been thought-through, planned and executed properly, otherwise the ‘ghost of abrdn’ will haunt the business for years and remain an ever-present reminder of their brandtastrophy.
I imagine this patchy re-rebrand was implemented in-house to save money. If not, the consultants (probably not Wolff Olins) should be hauled over the Scottish coals.
Morals of the story
1. Having brand aspirations is great, but never try and rebrand as a disruptor, without being able to fulfil the promise.
2. The first and second rebrands will have more than paid for themselves in free publicity, so it’s not all bad news. Like Jaguar last November, a controversial rebrand is probably the most cost-effective way of getting lots of people to talk about your forgotten brand.
Peter Matthews
Nucleus Founder & CEO
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