Mocking the Abrdn name is ‘corporate bullying’, says chief investment officer | Aberdeen Asset Management
It is a worldwide firm with greater than two centuries of managing cash however for Abrdn jokes in the media about the lack of vowels in its name is no laughing matter.
After altering its name three years in the past, an govt at the fund supervisor previously often known as Standard Life Aberdeen has accused the media of “corporate bullying” that will not be acceptable if the enterprise was an individual.
Chief investment officer Peter Branner pointed a finger at the press, which he stated continued to make “childish jokes” about the name change.
“I understand that corporate bullying to some extent is part of the game with the press, even though it’s a little childish to keep hammering the missing vowels in our name,” he stated in an interview with the commerce journal Financial News.
“Would you do that with an individual? How would you look at a person who makes fun of your name day-in day-out? It’s probably not ethical to do it. But apparently with companies it is different,” he added.
Unlike people who hardly ever select their very own names, Abrdn paid an undisclosed sum to branding company Wolff Olins earlier than deciding on its new id in one among the most divisive company rebrands in current reminiscence.
The firm, shaped by the £3.8bn merger of Standard Life and Aberdeen Asset Management in 2017, was pushed to rebrand after promoting its UK and European life insurance coverage enterprise, in addition to its Standard Life model name, to Phoenix Group.
The change prompted fast criticism of the asset supervisor’s “ill-thought-out” determination to drop its vowels, which is a technique extra usually employed by TikTok stars and YouTubers similar to the Strictly Come Dancing star Hrvy.
Sources stated the firm rejected utilizing “Aberdeen”, as a result of it could not have been capable of management the mental property rights for the name of an current metropolis.
Instead, it settled on Abrdn in the spring of 2021, prompting scorn from City analysts, linguists and the press, who joked the firm was experiencing “irritable vowel syndrome”, and was attempting to be “too cool for schl”, and that the determination was “rlly stpd”.
Chief govt Stephen Bird – who has been jokingly known as Stphn Brd – has since defended the change, and claimed shoppers had “fully embraced it”.
An Abrdn spokesperson stated: ‘‘As Peter made clear in his interview, we recognize it is for the media to make their very own assessments about the corporations they want to write about.”
