This Bank's Bland Rebrand: A Corporate Identity Crisis in the City
Thursday 29 January 2026 9:08 am
By: Simon Hunt, City Editor
What's in a name? When it comes to corporate rebranding, the answer should be creativity, vision, and strategic thinking. Unfortunately, the recent renaming of JN Bank to This Bank delivers none of these qualities. This latest corporate rebrand is insipid, lacks imagination, and represents a significant misstep in marketing strategy.
The Perilous Path of Corporate Rebranding
Marketing strategies are notoriously difficult to execute successfully. Developing a new name, logo, and motto is riddled with potential pitfalls and dangers. I don't begrudge the professionals who are paid to attempt this challenging work, but the results often fall short of expectations.
The Square Mile is haunted by a litany of botched corporate rebrands that serve as cautionary tales for any business considering a name change. Not long ago, Aberdeen Asset Management changed its name back to Aberdeen from the impossible-to-pronounce Abrdn. Despite years of defending this unconventional spelling, executives ultimately couldn't stomach the continued ridicule directed at their awkward moniker.
Historic Branding Failures in the Corporate World
Many in the City will be old enough to remember when the Post Office attempted to rename itself Consignia back in 2001. After nearly everyone mocked this peculiar choice, the move was reversed barely more than a year later, with the silly name consigned to the corporate scrapheap where it belonged.
Around the same period, BP attempted to tell shareholders that its name stood for Beyond Petroleum, in a nod to its environmental ambitions. Both the reinterpreted name and those green aspirations have since quietly dissolved into the atmosphere, demonstrating how rebranding efforts can fail to achieve their intended goals.
The This Bank Rebrand: A Study in Anodyne Naming
Which brings us to the current case of This Bank. In case you missed the announcement, this financial institution relaunched this week under this remarkably bland new identity, having previously been known as JN Bank. Mindful of the perils demonstrated by failed rebrands of yesteryear, marketing chiefs clearly opted for the most anodyne, innocuous name they could possibly conceive.
And what an utterly awful name it truly is. Imagine walking down a typical British high street, popping into a grocery store called This Supermarket, before swinging by This Corner Shop for a copy of the daily This News, and then heading over to This Pub for a pint of This Bitter. This is presumably the vision of total insipidity that marketing executives for This Bank had in mind – a landscape devoid of imagination and character.
The Cost of Uninspired Branding Strategy
Yet these marketing professionals were probably paid handsomely for their strategic consulting work on this rebranding exercise. The fundamental question remains: who will actually be inspired to open an account with an institution bearing such a forgettable, generic name? Certainly not this journalist. In an increasingly competitive financial services landscape, distinctive branding matters more than ever, making This Bank's choice particularly puzzling and potentially damaging to their market position.
