Anglo plays the name change game

WE FINALLY got to enjoy a brief, unexpected moment of catharsis this week when a man with a screwdriver and a high-viz jacket scaled a ladder and began to dismantle that potent reminder of all that ails us: the sign outside Anglo Irish Bank headquarters on St Stephen’s Green.

In an impressively choreographed operation, the action was being replicated at branches throughout the country in a long overdue moment of symbolic theatre that offered the appearance of punishment.

It became quite a media event and one news website invited readers to play Anglo Scrabble and create anagrams from the removed letters. Our own efforts: Big loan shark in; Garish lion bank; Bring koala shin.

What was most remarkable was that it had taken so long for the signs to come down, for the toxic Anglo Irish Bank name to be disowned and erased. The old name-change trick is a corporate tradition, so why did it take so long for it to happen here?

“Once and for all, it should give people an incredibly strong sense of finality in terms of the fate of this institution that has cost Ireland so dearly,” said Mike Aynsley, the bank’s chief executive, in perhaps an acknowledgement that such a sense of finality was overdue.

In the branding business they talk about name equity, and in the brand image game, Anglo was in serious negative equity. It’s only a slight exaggeration to suggest the name alone triggers a kind of mental retching for many people, while the logo acts as a visual shorthand for corporate arrogance and incompetence.

Leaving that name and logo up on buildings around the country isn’t the bank’s greatest crime, but it has been suggestive of a certain lack of repentance – though in fairness, it had bigger problems to deal with than engaging marketing firms to put a brand-name band-aid on its poisoned reputation. Aynsley says a new name will be revealed after the merger with Irish Nationwide this summer, but it’s inevitably destined to join the rogues’ gallery of corporate name changes.

Branding is an art form, as any Mad Menfan will tell you, but when a company's reputation has become as badly damaged as Anglo's, it requires an act of creative disassociation, a break from the sins of the past through brand-name rebirth.

Some, inevitably, are more successful than others. Famously, Andersen Consulting, when splitting from Arthur Andersen after the Enron scandal, became Accenture, a marketing mash-up of “Accent on the future”, but it sounds rather like a sinister sci-fi corporation. So did Enron.

In 2009, Blackwater, which quickly became a byword for mercenary war-mongering after its antics in Iraq, changed its name to Xe (pronounced Zee), a breaking of the first rule of naming anything, be it a child, a pet or an army for hire – strive to avoid spellings that require a pronunciation guide in brackets.

The cigarette industry is perennially in need of improved image equity, so the tobacco giant Philip Morris became Altria in 2003, complete with a meaningless colour chart logo. It rather undermined all that effort by maintaining the name Philip Morris USA for its primary subsidiary, the one that makes those dangerous cigarettes. Altria was apparently chosen because it means “high” in Latin, not the most judicious connotation perhaps, but it does confirm the suspicion that more Latin-English dictionaries are sold to brand name companies than classics students.

A notorious fiasco was the short-lived Consignia, the moniker foisted on the UK’s Royal Mail in 2001. How many mislaid parcels and delayed letters does a postal service have to be responsible for to require its name be changed to something as feeble as Consignia?

All these examples are amusing enough, but does rebranding work? The truth is we respond to brands, we find comfort in the familiar logos, we emotionally invest in the finely calibrated personalities they project. But when we are failed by those companies, and rarely has a company failed so many as Anglo, we are failed by more than the sum of their brand identity.

The act of erasing a brand and creating a new one implies a sort of recuperative amnesia, but it’s only recuperative for the corporation.

For the rest of us, the perils of forgetting the past are great. Perhaps, then, the merged Anglo and Nationwide institution should continue to exist as the Bank with No Name, a kind of Tomb of the Unknown Soldier for the banking industry, an eloquent reminder of lessons that should not be forgotten.