Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

My top tip for predicting whether a business is doomed

It’s a useful rule of thumb that any business which reduces its name to its initials is heading for trouble. Having gone that way under Goodwin, RBS almost doubled down last year by becoming the lower-case ‘rbs’, before apparently thinking better of it. British Petroleum became ‘BP’ after its 1998 merger with Amoco, tried to claim a greener image by suggesting that the B might stand for ‘Beyond’, and has never really been stable since. ‘British’, like Scottish, was evidently an unsuitable tag for a global player.

Likewise BG, the former exploration arm of British Gas, was an unhappy ship for years before its recent takeover by the robustly unabbreviated Royal Dutch Shell. The homely British Home Stores became faux-trendy BhS (later Bhs and BHS, as if it made any difference) as the lost sheep of the Storehouse group, following its merger with Habitat and Mothercare in 1986; when the full name was eventually revived in small print below the big letters, it was too late.

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