There is something cheering about FundForum, Europe’s largest asset management conference, returning to its old name after an incomprehensible spell as IMPower.
IMPower, the name of a London-based consultancy and, I assumed, a sponsor, perhaps suggested energy, but it didn’t catch on in the asset management community. Nobody in the industry ever asked colleagues whether they were going to IMPower that year, for example.
However, Informa, the company behind FundForum, says that it does not have a relationship with the IMpower consultancy, and the rebrand was not connected to any sponsorship arrangements.
In financial services, names are not just wrappers. They carry memories of years of meetings, business cards, late-night drinks, panel arguments and half-remembered introductions in hotel lobbies.
The asset management industry is particularly prone to the seductive rebrand. Its products are abstract, its language regulated, its margins under pressure and its audiences increasingly fragmented.
A new name can seem like a clean answer to messy strategic questions. Want to signal technology? Pick a snappier word. Want to appeal to private wealth as well as institutions? Widen the title. Want to sound less like yesterday’s funny-duddy mutual fund world? Drop the word “fund” altogether or shorten your name – from Prudential Global Investment Management to PGIM, for example.
Changing a well-known and widely-used name or brand to include the name of a sponsor is never a good idea, despite the revenue it may bring. Thankfully the practice of renaming entire buildings after sponsors seems to be mostly restricted to the events or sports sectors. The rebranding of London’s Millennium Dome as the O2, a mobile phone company, was a particularly egregious example.
It also led to the widely-ridiculed transformation of one of the City’s tallest buildings to Salesforce Tower after the US tech firm became the largest tenant at 110 Bishopsgate.
Within the funds industry the morphing of Standard Life Aberdeen (which came into being following the merger of venerable Standard Life with Aberdeen Asset Management) into abrdn, eventually led to the company reverting to aberdeen last year – despite the company being based in Edinburgh.
Call me a pedant, but please don’t break the rules of English grammar – and expect the journalists who have to rewrite your press releases to follow suit – by removing capitals (and most vowels) from proper nouns.
The original name FundForum did one unfashionable thing well: it said what it was on the tin. It was specific enough to be remembered and delegates did not need to decode the name, ask whether it was a conference, a campaign, a platform or an energy company. That kind of instant comprehension is hard-won and easily squandered.
That does not mean rebrands are always mistakes. Sometimes they are unavoidable as businesses outgrow geographies, technologies and legacy associations. Bad names can trap good companies.
But the threshold should be higher than it often is. Before changing a name, firms should ask what recognition they are prepared to lose? What new meaning will the new brand create? And will the audience care as much as the marketing team does?
While it may have been prompted by IMPower pulling sponsorship (a statement about the change of name on the FundForum website offers no explanation), Informa’s decision to revert to FundForum’s original name – as as well as returning the event to its former more glamorous, and more popular, Monaco location after several years in Berlin and then a dreary airport hotel in Copenhagen – is a useful reminder that progress does not always require novelty.
