Rip off the plaster

When rebranding becomes necessary, do it decisively, exhaustively and quickly.

This is an extract from last week's IMTW.

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Issue № 115 | London, Sunday 10 November 2024

Read on to learn why:

① Easy and memorable beats distinctive and clever.

② Your name is not your brand.

③ Wealth managers need to understand private markets.

④ Banks should optimise their resource allocation for growth and stability.

⑤ AI and personalisation are set to boost the effectiveness of B2B advertising.

⑥ The tension over return-to-office policies shows no sign of abating.

⑦ The financial markets of the future depend on digital money.

?? But first, flashback to last week when I told you that Google will be facing real competition in search. This week, ChatGPT launched its search product.

What's new

JP Morgan rebranded its blockchain unit to Kinexys, Ledger Insights reports.

In short:

• “JP Morgan has rebranded its Onyx blockchain unit to Kinexys by JP Morgan. […] The new name combines the concepts of ‘kinetic’ and ‘connection’, to reflect the worldwide movement of money, assets and financial information using the efficiencies of DLT. The highest profile Onyx solution is the blockchain based bank account system, JPM Coin Systems, which enables corporates to move money between JP Morgan accounts in different countries, in real time and 24/7. That is now rebranded to Kinexys Digital Payments.”
• “The bank is spinning the rebrand as a positive step, as one would expect. However, the trigger is likely trademark issues. Given Onyx is a generic word, it would encounter potential challenges. A company that was already using the name might have objected to trademark applications or even alleged infringement.”
• “Last June the bank applied for trademarks for Onyx Digital Payments and Onyx Digital Assets. The records show the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office examiner sent initial refusals for the trademarks on various grounds, including partial overlaps with existing trademarks for similar use cases and other applications that pre-dated these applications. Given JP Morgan’s lawyers didn’t respond, the applications were treated as abandoned.”

Why it matters

This story positions what JP Morgan has done as a rebrand - and to some degree it is, the bank clearly wants to build a brand around this new business line - but I think it’s important to distinguish ‘name’ and ‘brand’. Your brand is bigger than your name and includes all the other elements that determine how your customers feel when they think about you, such as tagline, tone of voice, and visual appearance. That aside, the article matters because JP Morgan are schooling us in how to do this sort of thing well.

Although they’ve come up with a narrative to explain the name - reflecting what the business is about: the worldwide movement of money, assets and financial information using distributed ledger technology - it’s clear that what was really driving the change was uncertainty over their ownership of the IP. What’s impressive is that they’ve acted decisively and quickly chosen an alternative that is just as good.

This recalls Monzo Bank. The neobank enjoys such brand recognition nowadays that many don’t even remember that it started life as Mondo in 2015. After a legal challenge, the management team decided to simply change one letter. The new name didn’t have the clever ‘world’ connotations of the original but no one cares and I’d argue it’s actually a better fit: slightly irreverent.

This kind of situation isn’t uncommon. Innovation teams operate fast and often without all the due diligence or corporate frameworks that more mainstream parts of the business are subject too. But at some point they need to grow up. JP Morgan’s blockchain platform has now executed more than $1.5 trillion since launch, with current volumes exceeding $2 billion daily. That might still by tiny compared to the $10 trillion in conventional payments the bank processes daily but it’s clearly time for the business line to come out of the sandpit and prepare to be institutionalised.

What to do about it

Take action

① If it does become necessary to change a name:

1. Be decisive and act early: You may hesitate over jettisoning a name you’ve spent time building awareness of. Don’t. It will never be easier to do than today.
2. Consider product hierarchy: Is the name going to grow with your offering? Does it offer a framework that will work with your existing product lines and accommodate more in the future?
3. Prioritise digital real estate: We live in a digital age. Any name you choose needs to have website domains and social media handles available and lend itself to portrait orientated logos.
4. Aim for easy and memorable over distinctive and clever: The brand consultants will spend money like sailors coming up with clever names and narratives. No one will remember them. Keep it simple.

② And finally, don’t agonise over it too much. Founders, perhaps because of their emotional attachment to their products, are prone to fixating on finding the ‘right’ name. The truth is that the mundane-sounding considerations above are more important. If you doubt that, consider that there’s a personal technology company in Cupertino that’s doing pretty well - and they named the company after nothing more evocative than a common fruit. Your name is part of your brand but it’s by no means the most important part.

Get help

IMTW is brought to you by InMarketing, a strategic advisory service for senior leadership teams in B2B finance and technology. It can help you with:

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To learn why:

③ Wealth managers need to understand private markets.

④ Banks should optimise their resource allocation for growth and stability.

⑤ AI and personalisation are set to boost the effectiveness of B2B advertising.

⑥ The tension over return-to-office policies shows no sign of abating.

⑦ The financial markets of the future depend on digital money.

Visit InMarketing This Week for the rest of this issue >

About

Written for senior leadership teams in B2B finance and technology, InMarketing This Week is a showcase for news likely to impact you - delivered with insight on why it matters and ideas on what to do about it. It’s published every Sunday at six to give you a head start on the week. Read extracts?here, or subscribe to?have each full issue delivered straight to your inbox, before it's available anywhere else.