Fund supervisor aberdeen’s rebrand may put it again on the map | USAEMALL.com

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The Es are back. Aberdeen, a fund manager with prospects as dreich (Scottish for drab) as its home city, axed the vowels in a bid to revive its fortunes in 2021. No dice: abrdn floundered just the same. Now a newish boss has reinstated the old name to “mark a new phase for the organisation”. 

Investors seem encouraged by the asset manager’s return to profit, revamped strategy and targets. These ignited a 13 per cent mid-morning pop in the beleaguered share price. The return of the errant vowels, meanwhile, highlights the folly of removing them in the first place. 

Disemvowelment has a place — with Canadian electro musicians such as Mstrkrft, say, or Elon Musk’s progeny. Likewise, in literature, where George Perec authored the lipogrammatic La Disparition, 300-odd pages without the letter e.

In the corporate world, not so much. Changing names is a last resort in a place where continuity is valued. It is no coincidence that some of the longest-standing companies bear the same name they did centuries ago, such as Japan’s Mitsui and America’s DuPont.

Besides, consumers of companies’ products are creatures of habit regardless of quirky leaning bosses. More than two years after Musk rebranded his $44bn purchase X, plenty of people still refer to it as Twitter.

For sure, there are times when a name change is acceptable or even mandatory. We would all be backrubbing every day if a brace of students called Larry Page and Sergey Brin had not renamed their search engine Google. 

Company pivots also justify a renaming. But, in heralding a new chapter, simplicity is up there with retaining vowels. After merging with Guinness in 1997, distiller Grand Metropolitan went classical: Diageo, after the Latin word for day and the Greek for world. Still, there is a suitably Bacchanalian ring to a world where people are drinking daily.

That changing names and fortunes is linked is not axiomatic. Look at the vowelless WW, most recently punctured by the arrival of anti-obesity drugs and a shadow of its former Weight Watchers self. 

To its credit, aberdeen has not called in the brand experts to revert to its old name. By contrast, the vowelless creation came from Wolff Olins, the brand consultancy also Diageo and a ridiculed £50mn BT rebrand in the 1990s.

Aberdeen has not entirely eschewed the typographic pretentiousness — witness its lower case “a”. But the decanting of new wine into the old bottle is a bold move, acknowledging its ill-judged former rebrand. Investors can focus on the numbers rather than elusive vowels.

louise.lucas@ft.com