It is every marketing exec’s worst nightmare: you are happily building a really successful brand in a new space, when along comes a group of well paid, highly organised and zealous militant jihadis with the same brand name. All that work up in smoke.
This is the problem facing leading mobile wallet app Isis in the US. The wallet was set up by AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile in the US in 2010 with a prescient eye on how m-payments would become a real money spinner in retail and commerce in the years ahead.
But it has been forced to ditch the brand name and come up with a new one thanks to our friends in the east.
However, despite gaining powerful backers like American Express and JPMorgan, the service has failed to catch on, and it faces competition from the likes of Google Wallet, PayPal, Square, Venmo and many others. So perhaps the rebrand exercise can be put to good use and help create a new force in m-payments.
Meanwhile there has been no comment from the part of the river Thames from Iffley Lock which flows through the university city of Oxford as to whether it is going to phase out the name Isis.
