Advisor Group's New Name Gets Mixed Reviews

Osaic, the new brand name for Advisor Group, is being greeted with a mixed reaction from some members of the financial services industry.

The firm’s rebranding initiative goes hand in hand with its previously announced plans to unite its eight firms into one entity. It indicated in April that it was considering a new brand name.

“Some people commented to me that the name sounded like a drug like Ozempic, while one advisor said he wasn’t even sure how to pronounce it,” Jon Henschen, president of the recruiting firm Henschen & Associates, told ThinkAdvisor by email Thursday.

“One of my recruiters jokingly said, ‘Osaic stands for: Oh S— Another Identity Crisis,’” he said.

“When they were owned by AIG, they had an identity crisis when [one of the broker-dealers] had the name AIG Financial Advisors,” he noted. “The 2008-2009 meltdown made that name toxic, which is when they came up with SagePoint.”

But, with the new name Osaic, “this isn’t an identity crisis now but rather, somehow trying to bring unity through a new name, [and] rebranding can bring unintended consequences,” Henschen said.

“I don’t think an alternative name was necessary,” he explained. “They could have just gone by Advisor Group which has history and explains what they are.”

‘Right for You?’

Also questioning the new name was Rob Farmer, managing director and head of communications at The Rudin Group, who told ThinkAdvisor: “Companies undergo name and branding changes for many good reasons. Advisor Group’s stated rationale — to unify their various firms under a single structure — makes sense.”

He, too, preferred the company’s old brand name, saying: “You could argue that ‘Advisor Group’ was effective, and clear, in service of that already. What is less clear is the meaning of the [new] name itself.”

Farmer conceded that it “may well be that over the long term it will create a little sunlight between them and a crowded, competitive marketplace.”

But Farmer added: “My initial reaction is an urge to add a tagline: Ask your doctor if Osaic is right for you!”

‘More Than Just the Name’

“We’ve seen some of these comments before,” Osaic’s executive vice president of marketing and communications, Jen Roche, told ThinkAdvisor in a phone interview Thursday afternoon. “Whenever you go through a rebrand — you announce a new name, a new logo, anything like that — you’re going to have a lot of people who love it, you’re going to have some people who don’t like it.”

Therefore, Roche said: “We knew we were going to get a mixed reaction as we launched our new brand and we certainly expected negative reaction from recruiters and competitors. That is their job. That is what they do.”

What was more important to the company, however, was that “our advisors, our clients, our employees had an overwhelmingly positive reaction to the new brand,” she said.

Roche also clarified specifically why the company selected Osaic as its new brand name, telling ThinkAdvisor that it was derived from the word mosaic, which means “a lot of different things are coming together to create something beautiful and new.”