Some weeks it just writes itself, doesn’t it?  

There’s a bit of me, a big bit of me, that wanted to not make ‘E’ jokes about Aberdeen’s name change (it’s not a rebrand apparently), especially given that you can read jokes and snarks here and here and here and here and here and here. 

(That last link is worth reading because it highlights a new issue, which is that the company now wants to be known with a lower case ‘a’ at all times. Take it from me lads, as someone with a company that used to have a lower case logo, it won’t last and you should just accept that the rest of the world is going to cap your name, like I did in the first sentence of the last para.) 

So yeah, a bit of me wants to write about something else. There’s a much bigger bit of me that simply can’t resist, and sometimes you just have to be true to yourself, amirite? 

So anyway, Aberdeen (feels nice to be able to write that again) has reinserted its E’s, and I’m very proud that we were able to donate them from the title of this week’s Update. These days good E’s are hard to find (sorry) and it’s nice to be able to play our part. I’m happy to be paid less than Wolf Ollins, but not much and my invoice is in the post. 

Actually that reminds me of my very favourite psstk of the original rebrand, where Mr C from the Shamen suggested that dropping three E’s was a “commendable notion”. For our younger readers, The Shamen were a dance act before you were born and did a song about dropping E’s called Ebeneezer Goode which had Jerry Sadowitz in the video. Jerry Sadowitz was a very edgy comedian and magician back when being edgy meant something, before it was ruined by the likes of Ricky Gervais or Jimmy Carr mocking disabled people. 

The overriding feeling in the office is one of sadness, as we’re losing a source of easy jokes for presentations and stuff. Some companies just have no consideration, do they? I guess we’ll have to look elsewhere. 

The thing is, it’s hard to put the boot in too hard to a company that’s eventually seen sense. The original was patently ridiculous, and the argument that ‘at least it gets people talking’ was specious, you could have called the company a string of swearie words and that would do the same thing. But ridiculous or not, there was a lot of sunk equity and cost in the way things were and many firms wouldn’t have changed. It’s very hard to go back, it does take a degree of bravery and a willingness to lay yourself open, and you don’t always get what you want from it, but the main thing is to embrace the process and do the right thing.  

I don’t know what eventually swung it, but I have a suspicion that it was a mixture of sustained bad feedback from actual end clients, and a desire of the new management to show they’ve broken from the Stephen Bird years. Given that the share price headed North, close to its 52 week high yesterday, clearly at least some people liked the re-envowelment (and the maintained dividend probably).  

So it’s the end of an era and the start of a new one. Aberdeen can now focus on getting inflows positive, sorting service and all the other things it needs to do. The right question to ask is: what have we learned collectively from this?  

I have no idea, but I’d like to think that we might have learned to listen to end customer feedback about things like branding. It’s tempting to say it doesn’t matter, it’s just words and pictures, but of course that’s not true.  

Particularly if you are involved in serving the adviser market, jobs one, two and three are to make the adviser look good in front of her client. If it were me in charge of that business’s branding (or really any business) I wouldn’t particularly give a toss about jokes in the papers, or even moans from advisers at Very Excellent events run by feline-based companies in Edinburgh. What I would give a toss about is feedback from end clients once the initial fuss died down, and whether what my Fantoosh London Agency had given me was actually a distraction from the job at hand. Sometimes companies need reminded that what they want to do doesn’t matter, it’s what their customers want them to do that does. When you marry both up, then you get somewhere. 

So hurray for common sense, and let that be a lesson to the rest of you. Says the guy who named his business something stupid like ‘the lang cat’. Do what I say, not what I do. 

And your music choice this week – well, the obvious one is taken as I’ve done Ebeneezer Goode before. We’re having fun (aren’t we?) so let’s have a laugh track. In fact let’s have Laugh Track by The National and Phoebe Bridgers, partly because it’s a perfect song, partly because the video is so beautiful and partly because it’s actually not a laugh at all. You must learn to embrace duality in this game.