One of the fun things about the dot-com and cryptocurrency boom is how companies with no previous connection to dot-com or cryptocurrencies added these terms to their names and watched their stock prices soar. Perhaps the biggest example of this is the renaming of Long Island Ice Tea Corp as Long Blockchain Corp in 2017 with the promise of transitioning from making Arnold Palmers to making cryptocurrencies. This led to a 300% rally, years of investigations and no cryptocurrencies.
In what could be a hopeful sign for the climate, if not for investors, it turns out that green rebranding can also move stock prices. Companies that gave themselves new names “more likely to evoke sustainability sentiments in investors” between 2000 and 2022 enjoyed daily returns of 15% on average, according to a new study by the Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE.