When an email arrived the other day with news about something called “ofi”, I felt a stab of pity.
Some poor PR person working through the holidays must have fired off a press release without checking for typing mistakes, I thought.
It’s the sort of thing that can happen so easily in the depths of a European summer. But no. There were zero mistakes. The email contained a press release about a company that really had decided to call itself “ofi”, all lower case, even at the start of a sentence. And not just any company.
Further investigation revealed ofi stands for Olam Food Ingredients, a division of Singapore’s Olam, one of the world’s largest food traders.
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Spawned five years ago by an Olam restructuring, ofi has 18,000 employees engaged in the global supply of nuts, spices and other edibles. Why an outfit this large would give itself a name that looks like a spelling mistake is beyond me. Why it would compound the problem with a brand that no one can be sure of saying correctly is even more inexplicable.
Is ofi pronounced “offy”, with its unfortunate intimation of five-day-old fish? Or “oafy”, which brings to mind a tubby clod? Neither seems helpful for a company in the food business.
Such is the state of a modern marketing industry that seems perpetually unable to grasp the most basic elements of a decent company name: something that is easy to read, write and say, and not prone to ridicule.
The larger question is why company leaders keep falling for the opposite. Ofi unveiled its name in October 2021, six months after the UK investment firm Standard Life Aberdeen announced to wide astonishment it was changing its name to the weird and vowel-light abrdn.
This move was in a slightly different league to that of ofi, which is a new name for a new business division. Standard Life Aberdeen, whose roots date back to 1825, was doing a rebrand for reasons that were less obvious, and therefore more open to remorseless mockery for “disemvowelment”, “irritable vowel syndrome” and general pointlessness.
It was no surprise when a new chief executive ditched the name this year for the more sensible Aberdeen, in what newspapers immediately called a vowel movement. But the abrdn affair failed to stop more clunkers. When ofi announced its name, it said the brand underlined its “thrust and focus as it shakes up the market with fresh thinking”. Right.
It may have thought the name would help the offshoot of a company such as Olam that has, like other big agribusinesses, been criticised for links with unsustainable palm oil production. Perhaps it just thought it needed something modern, edgy and vaguely digital to keep up. Either way, it joined a long list of the unfortunate names and logos that have littered corporate life for decades.
Many follow the arrival of new bosses who can be ripe targets for eager rebranders, even in industries that take a dim view of such things, such as the news media. In 2016, a new chair of Chicago’s Tribune Publishing newspaper group decided to rename the business Tronc, short for Tribune Online Content, in what was widely agreed to be one of the worst corporate rebrands ever.
It was reversed two years later, as these things often are. As I type, there is much mockery of US cable TV network MSNBC’s rebrand to MS NOW. It’s supposed to stand for My Source News Opinion World, not Multiple Sclerosis Now and I won’t be surprised if it is tweaked.
Younger readers may not know that Tropicana once thought it a genius idea to replace the picture of an orange with a straw sticking out of it that had long adorned its cartons with an image of a bland glass of juice. A wave of customer outrage was followed by a brisk U-turn.
This did not stop Gap from heading down the same path a year later, when it swapped its distinctive blue logo for a bland redesign that customers loathed. Retreat followed days later. Marketing is not easy.
Today’s crowded media landscape makes it harder than ever. But the curious thing about all these moves is they must have seemed so sensible inside the boardroom, yet would never have survived first contact with a normal person outside.
Ultimately, each case shows what happens when a company forgets the most obvious rule of business life and puts the customer last. – Copyright The Financial Times
