abrdn re-rebrands to aberdeen - but what do people think of the change?

The investment firm formerly known as Aberdeen Standard Life, Aberdeen Asset Management and – most recently and controversially – abrdn has re-rebranded to aberdeen. At the time of its vowel-free 2021 name change, the firm accused news outlets (including City AM)  of “childish” behaviour and said it would be unethical to treat an individual the same way. 

YouGov BrandIndex – which asks the public questions about brands across a range of sectors every day – didn’t track aberdeen/abrdn at the time, so we can’t say for sure whether the public sympathised with the claims of “corporate bullying” against the FTSE 250-listed global investment firm. 

But we do track them now, and we can say that news of the re-rebrand has not turned brand perceptions around. Looking only at consumers who are aware of the brand, Buzz scores, which measure whether people have heard anything good or bad about a company in the past fortnight, have fallen from 1.0 – not far off the average score for investment firms of 1.8 among these consumers – to -11.1 (-10.1). 

Impression scores (a measure of general sentiment) have gone from 11.3 on 3 March 2025 – the day before the change of name was announced – to 0.9 (-10.4) as of 15 March 2025. This means aberdeen/abrdn has gone from being more well-liked than the average investment brand (4.5) among aware consumers to underperforming this average.  Quality scores have also declined from 20.6 to 11.5 (-9.1), again taking it below the industry average (13.4). 

It would perhaps be too much to ascribe this negative reaction to a dislike of aberdeen’s new (old) name. It may be that the effort to course-correct has simply reminded these consumers of the initial abrdn rebrand story. But if one more round of negative reactions to an aberdeen name change is the price the firm has to pay to – in the words of Chief Executive Jason Winter – “remove distractions”, it may be worth paying in order to draw a line under the episode. 

This article originally appeared in City AM.