New Aberdeen, Sorry, Abrdn Brand

Investment house Aberdeen has a new brand!

After the 2017 merger between financial services veteran Standard Life and the much younger Aberdeen Asset Management, the new company name became Standard Life Aberdeen.

Today the business has been rebranded as just Abrdn. So Standard Life Aberdeen is now Abrdn. Or, according to the official imagery, abrdn.

The official company announcement on Twitter went something like this…

Today we’ve announced our change of name to Abrdn, part of a modern, digitally-enabled brand we’ll use across our businesses globally. Capital at risk. https://t.co/D5YUZx3RPO pic.twitter.com/kOw5NQVH7j

— aberdeen (@aberdeen_plc) April 26, 2021

Abrdn’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Stephen Bird said of the rebranding:

“Our new brand Abrdn builds on our heritage and is modern, dynamic and, most importantly, engaging for all of our client and customer channels,”

This new rebrand certainly follows the trend of modernisation and consolidation. However, nobody can help but notice the… missing vowels! Or is that mssng vwls?

As well as the consonant-only new branding, there’s the headache of the forced lower case. Is it Abrdn, abrdn, or ABRDN? Obviously the last option looks like an acronym, whilst Abrdn looks like a typo, and abrdn just looks like gobbledigook.

Anyway, whatever you think, Abrdn (abrdn) is still to be pronounced “Aberdeen”.

Brand Critique

But it’s not just us who are having issues with the new branding.

Calling Aberdeen Asset Management the new abbreviated Abrdn led to mocking comments about being “disemvowelled” or having “irritable vowel syndrome”.

Another literal critique suggested that the phonetics could be misread as “a burden” – Not a positive moniker for any serious company.

But one of the funniest japes has to be the one tipping a hat to Rachel Riley, putting up the letter tiles on the board for the Countdown Letters Round…

“Another consonant please Rachel…” #abrdn pic.twitter.com/7CotVUngvO

— PD Colinton (@PDColinton) April 26, 2021

Whatever you think about Aberdeen’s rebrand, it is certainly bold and modern. Not sure the lack of vowels is as cool as they think it is though.