Osaic, the brand new model identify for Advisor Group, is being greeted with a combined response from some members of the monetary companies business.
The agency’s rebranding initiative goes hand in hand with its beforehand introduced plans to unite its eight companies into one entity. It indicated in April that it was contemplating a brand new model identify.
“Some individuals commented to me that the identify gave the impression of a drug like Ozempic, whereas one advisor mentioned he wasn’t even certain how to pronounce it,” Jon Henschen, president of the recruiting agency Henschen & Associates, instructed ThinkAdvisor by e mail Thursday.
“A recruiter jokingly mentioned, ‘Osaic stands for: Oh S— One other Id Disaster,’” he defined.
“After they have been owned by AIG, that they had an id disaster when [one of the broker-dealers] had the identify AIG Monetary Advisors,” he famous. “The 2008-2009 meltdown made that identify poisonous, which is once they got here up with SagePoint.”
However, with the brand new identify Osaic, “this isn’t an id disaster now however relatively, by some means making an attempt to carry unity by way of a brand new identify, [and] rebranding can carry unintended penalties,” Henschen mentioned.
“I don’t assume an alternate identify was vital,” he defined. “They may have simply passed by Advisor Group which has historical past and explains what they’re.”
‘Proper for You?’
Additionally questioning the brand new identify was Rob Farmer, managing director and head of communications at The Rudin Group, who instructed ThinkAdvisor: “Corporations endure identify and branding adjustments for a lot of good causes. Advisor Group’s said rationale — to unify their numerous companies underneath a single construction — is smart.”
He, too, most popular the corporate’s outdated model identify, saying: “You would argue that ‘Advisor Group’ was efficient, and clear, in service of that already. What’s much less clear is the that means of the [new] identify itself.”
Farmer conceded that it “could be that over the long run it’ll create slightly daylight between them and a crowded, aggressive market.”
However Farmer added: “My preliminary response is an urge so as to add a tagline: Ask your physician if Osaic is best for you!”
‘Extra Than Simply the Title’
“We’ve seen a few of these feedback earlier than,” Osaic’s govt vice chairman of selling and communications, Jen Roche, instructed ThinkAdvisor in a telephone interview Thursday afternoon. “Everytime you undergo a rebrand — you announce a brand new identify, a brand new emblem, something like that — you’re going to have lots of people who like it, you’re going to have some individuals who don’t prefer it.”
Subsequently, Roche mentioned: “We knew we have been going to get a combined response as we launched our new model and we definitely anticipated detrimental response from recruiters and rivals. That’s their job. That’s what they do.”
What was extra vital to the corporate, nevertheless, was that “our advisors, our purchasers, our staff had an overwhelmingly constructive response to the brand new model,” she mentioned.
Roche additionally clarified particularly why the corporate chosen Osaic as its new model identify, telling ThinkAdvisor that it was derived from the phrase mosaic, which suggests “a whole lot of various things are coming collectively to create one thing lovely and new.”
