The Portland Art Museum has a donor wall, and on Saturday I stood in front of it longer than I stood in front of the art. Names in brushed metal. A few I recognized. Most I did not. All of them permanent, in the way engraved things look permanent right up until somebody arrives with a putty knife.
I was thinking about the Sacklers. Everyone in this business is right now.
Purdue Pharma filed for Chapter 11 on Sunday. That is the financial story. The brand story started earlier this year, when the Louvre took the name off its wing of antiquities, and the Tate said it would accept no more of the family's money, and the Met and the Guggenheim followed. A name that bought its way onto the most prestigious walls in the world is being scraped off those same walls, one institution at a time.
Which should frighten anyone who has built equity in a surname.
A name is not an asset you own. It is a running account of what people currently believe about you, and the balance can go negative.
For decades the Sackler name did exactly what naming gifts are supposed to do. It borrowed credibility from institutions that had more of it and lent money in return. Museums get wings, donors get a reputation set in marble. It works because everyone agrees not to look closely at where the money came from, and it stops working the moment somebody does.
Here is the part that gets lost. The museums are not making a moral discovery. They are making an inventory decision. The name went from being an asset on the wall to being a liability on the wall, and institutions manage liabilities.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, at a much smaller scale. A founder's name on the door gets treated as free equity, permanent and cost-free, because nobody ever prices the downside. Then a filing gets unsealed, and the most expensive thing the company owns turns out to be the sign.
Three things worth doing about it. One, know whether your brand is carrying a person or an idea, because people have behavior and ideas do not. Two, understand that reputational equity accrues slowly and unwinds all at once, so any plan built on a gentle slope is already wrong. Three, if your name belongs to someone still living and still speaking in public, you do not have a brand. You have an exposure.
The name went from being an asset on the wall to being a liability on the wall, and institutions manage liabilities.
Truffles spent the writing of this sitting directly on my keyboard, indifferent to reputational risk. Barnaby knocked a pen off the desk and left. Neither of them has a name worth anything to anyone but me, which this week reads like a luxury.