When Corporate Branding Goes Wrong

So much corporate branding has gone flat, boring and sterile. There's also guaranteed to be a backlash at some point, with flashy logos and bright colours. It's a pretty good way to stand out at least. Take Mozilla, they went bland, boring, now they're adding a "fun" ASCII lizard. Just embrace the old half-ugly red Godzilla-like lizard, it's fun, distinct, has a history and it's perfectly fine.

We lost pretty much all of the playfulness of the late 90s, early 2000s as companies are playing it increasingly safe. I'd love to see some of it come back, but also businesses segment more. There's no reason a toy store should have the same bland corporate identity as a bank, nor should an investment firma adopt the identity of a record company (or vice versa).

Still lower case, though. Joining the ranks of other cool companies like nationwide. I reckon some giant lame brand like Tesco or Walmart will go lower case soon, finally ending the trend.

I would say Aberdeen asset management made two mistakes here:

1) they didn't notice they still had a vowel right at the very start of their name, immediately marking them out to the kids as uncool.

2) Failing to explore/deliver comarketing opportunities. Obviously the Scottish city of Aberdeen could and should have followed suit and dropped the vowels from local signage.

After such elementary blunders it's no surprise to see the rebranding failed.

The mission of a company is to deliver value for customers and shareholders, not to chase fads.

See also: SunnyD, IHOB