What’s in a name? The corporate rebrand for This Bank is insipid and lacks imagination, says Simon Hunt.
Marketing strategies are hard to get right. Coming up with a new name, a new logo, a new motto is riddled with danger. I don’t begrudge those paid to have a go at it.
A litany of botched corporate rebrands haunts various corners of the Square Mile. It’s not long ago that Aberdeen Asset Management changed its name back to Aberdeen from Abrdn. Despite years of defending it, execs just couldn’t stomach any more ridicule of the impossible-to-pronounce moniker.
Many in the City will be old enough to remember when the Post Office had a go at renaming itself “Consignia” in 2001. After just about everyone mocked the move, barely more than a year later it was reversed, with the silly name consigned (Consignia’d?) to the corporate scrapheap.
And not long after, BP had a go at telling shareholders its name stood for “Beyond Petroleum” in a nod to its green ambitions. The name and the ambitions have both since quietly dissolved into the atmosphere.
Which brings me on to This Bank. In case you missed it, this is a bank which this week relaunched as This Bank, after previously being known as JN Bank. Mindful of the perils of the failed rebrands of yesteryear, marketing chiefs clearly went for the most anodyne, innocuous name they could possibly come up with. And what an awful name it is.
Imagine walking down a high street, popping into a grocery store called This Supermarket, before swinging by This Corner Shop for a copy of the daily This News, and then heading over to This Pub for a pint of This Bitter.
That is presumably the high street marketing execs for This Bank had in mind – a vision of total insipidity, devoid of imagination. And yet they were probably paid handsomely for their “strategic consulting” work.
Who will open an account? Not this journalist.
