Aviva - Loco!

You could have bet your house or pension on it. I wrote about whether it was a great thing to market heavily in a recession and used the specific example of Norwich Union's parent, Aviva, taking the opportunity to shove its name change down our throats at the height of the recession.

I could argue all they needed to do was to announce big losses, have 33% of their share value wiped out and then cut 1,900 UK staff - we would all have noticed the name change. Instead, they embarked on a multi-million pound advertising campaign employing the likes of Bruce Willis, Elle McPherson, Ringo Starr, Alice Cooper and McCauley Culkin, to name a few, to tell us that changing their name was the key to future success and vital in a downturn.

Tell that to the 1,900 staff who will face the dole this year.

Corporate Bull

While professional marketeers may argue with me on the amount you should spend to keep your brand alive during a recession, the General Manager in me says there is a time and a place to announce a name change to just to boost the Corporate ego - and at the height of the recession, just before set of bad results and news, is not the time to do so.

This is an illustration of management stupidity and gross negligence. You can see bad results coming and you can plan for it. Marketing in a recession is important but you need to be clever, tactical and do only the things that will get a return for the money.

Corporate name changes and big TV advertising are notorious nebulous activities where it is hard to measure direct results and therefore estimate a proper return on the outlay. I would argue strongly that such moves are just corporate self-abuse at best and so doing them in the middle of a recession is just suicidal and management of the dumbest quality.

I could have predicted the outcome - it was a story writing itself. For the management who sanctioned such high profile spending at this time, they should have been the first of the 1,900 to leave.

Sadly, I will also bet not one of them will be leaving.