RIP Twitter — things thats Elon is doing horribly wrong with the brand
Elon Musk hit the world by surprise this week when he announced the forfeiture of the long-time Twitter brand with the introduction of X.
There’s been a lot of discussion on this topic and so I wanted to share my initial thoughts from a brand strategist’s perspective. A rebrand process from strategy, to naming, to visual and verbal identity usually takes months. Mr. Musk is doing this in…. days and in waves.
I wasn’t a Twitter user, but I feel like I went through the various stages of confusion and grief since the announcement: I was confused. what is going on? is elon ok? why does he hate the bird? does he think that birds aren’t real and is that why he wants to kill it?
I’ve accepted it, but I’m still confused.
Before we start:
Hi! I’m Kristine. I’m a brand strategist and I work in a brand consulting firm in New York City.
Branding is what I do on a day-to-day. Brands come to us and say ‘how can we build equity into this brand? how much equity do we have? can you value our brand? is it three million dollars? is it 10 million dollars? is it four billion dollars (in the case of Twitter) and how can we make this brand stronger?’
Brands are a signpost for when consumers and users are wanting to shop, wanting to download something. It’s a sign for them to say ‘this is something I’ve heard of. this is something I trust. let me try it.’
If you’ve never heard of something, you would probably never try it. So Twitter, being a brand that’s so well known, it doesn’t really make sense to me that this equity and all the value that’s been built into it is just scrapped.
I’ve gathered my thoughts in the following sections:
- things that make sense to me about the decision for the new brand
- things that don’t make sense and make me go huh what is going on
- questions I have that I need answers to
- things I look forward to seeing in the future from X
If you’re a video type of person, I’ve recorded my initial reactions too:
Things that make sense to me:
A lot of times when we see rebrands it’s because of change. It’s changes in leadership, changes in organization, changes in the business strategy.
Those are all things that has been happening in Twitter for the last year or so since it has been acquired and owned by Elon Musk.
There’s direct changes in leadership. He’s now the leader. He’s calling the shots. I think the market has been expecting that a brand decision or a brand announcement would come, even though probably not something as drastic as this.
It happens when a new page is turned. The CEOs want to make a statement saying that ‘this is a new regime.’ It’s kind of like in ancient Chinese history when a new dynasty is turned — from Ming to Qing. You want to call it something different, something your own, and mark that page in history.
Along with the leadership changes, we saw organizational shifts too. Namely, the layoffs we saw in Twitter. Prior, the head count was about 7500 people, now it’s only down to 2000. That’s a big shift.
Lastly, it’s wanting to put a stake in the ground. It’s announcing to the world and making a splash. As we’ve seen, all the news reports are reporting on this, so he has succeeded in doing this. However, I do question if he’s being a little bit too impulsive?
Things that still do not make sense
Whyyyyy?
Starting with a quote from a Fast Company article:
‘Musk’s approach to the Twitter brand has been as delicate as performing brain surgery with a sledgehammer. his disregard for the famous blue bird including replace it with the Dogecoin’s Shiba Inu and renaming the headquarters to Titter have been clear exercise in defilements, months in the making.’
I do kind of agree with that. It’s like he’s breaking everything to the ground and hoping something works.
You can build a brand from nothing. Companies do this all the time, but it’s why are you doing it?
The Twitter brand is actually valued at four billion dollars (or more). By killing Twitter, killing the blue bird, killing everything associated with it, killing Tweets, he’s throwing four billion dollars down the drain.
It’s 17 years of equity building that the brand has been doing since 2006, and it’s going to be many, many years before X reaches four billion dollars in brand valuation.
A brand is a valuable asset. It is intellectual property. It is something that’s trademarked. It’s an asset on the balance sheets. It’s an asset because part of what makes a company valuable is also because people know the brand and have feelings and associations with a brand.
A 2017 study that was done by Ocean Tomo found that in about 84% of the value of S&P 500 companies was these intangible assets, and of these intangible assets about one-fourth of that value is attributed directly to to these Brands. That’s a lot.
Another study done by Interbrand said, citing the top 10 Best Global Brands:
‘They are building businesses around their brand in contrast to the traditional approach of building brands from a product and that’s what is setting these top brands apart from the rest of the pack.’
It’s counterintuitive. Everyone is trying to build value into this brand so more consumers are going to buy their products. He’s gone the opposite direction and killed all established equity and will try to create a new brand, associate it with new meanings.
Why now?
Why is he announcing this name brand X now? He’s announcing X without anything, making it seem like just a placeholder. He asked for a logo through a tweet. Why was this not done internally in preparation to the announcement? Why is there no additional brand strategy? He has kind of a company vision, but nothing else around the brand.
There’s no product. It’s just X.
But why so drastic now? Is it because Zuckerberg made him mad in launching Threads?
Why X?
What’s the strategy behind the name? what does X mean?
There’s a lot of articles on ‘what is Elon Musk’s obsession with X.’
A couple of things that he named X in the past since 1999:
- He built the original x.com, which was an online banking startup that eventually became what PayPal is today.
- His child is nicknamed X. and he said at X stood for the unknown variable, which is also the case for X the company.
- At Tesla, he has X as a model — Model X in the series of cars.
- There’s Space X.
- Lastly, he purchased x.com the domain back from PayPal in 2017, tweeting at the time that it’s purely because he was nostalgic and he had no plans for the domain, just that ‘it had great sentimental value.’
All of which makes me feel like it’s just an obsession to him. He wants to build something great with X, but he hasn’t succeeded yet. That makes me doubt that he will do it today, especially when everything seems like it’s done on a whim.
Brand strategy?
He has a vision of making a super app / a super company, awesome. But, what is that brand going to be?
It didn’t have a logo, it didn’t have a narrative, it didn’t have a Mission or Vision. It is just an idea that’s in Mr. Musk’s head right now.
I would be interested to see what that company becomes in the future. It could be a parent company like Meta and Alphabet where X holds everything and different products underneath it. However, that argument doesn’t support the killing of Twitter. Twitter can just be a portfolio brand underneath the X parent company under that approach. Maybe he’ll bring it back in the future? I don’t know.
Questions I still need answers to
Trademarking?
Brand naming is a very interesting thing that I did not get to know about before I was in this industry. There’s so many intricacies with trademarking. There’s different trademarking classes. There’s different geographies. It takes a lot to get a name cleared.
A name that’s called X, how is that going to get trademarked? If it’s going to be a super app or a super company across multiple different uses, it’s going to have to get cleared across all those cases in all geographies it operates in. For example, if it’s in manufacturing, it has to get cleared for a manufacturing trademark class (and across all regions).
I’m not a trademarks expert, but every industry that X is going to step into will need clearance. From what I’ve seen this will be extremely challenging.
From an article by Reuters, X is currently owned by Meta and Microsoft (which are direct competitors). If Elon is trying to make this a super app in terms of social media, productivity, payment, travel, that’s going to require a lot of work from legal and trademarking. Meta filed and owned a trademark in 2019 for a blue and white letter X in software and social media. Microsoft owns the X trademark related to the Xbox video game systems. Those are fields that X company can’t step in or it will likely get sued by Meta and Microsoft.
SEO?
How is X going to stand out in the market?
- X is the ticker for the U.S Steel Corporation.
- There is an X.org that is an open source implementation of the X Windows system.
- There’s a movie called X.
- There’s model X from Tesla.
- There’s an Xbox series X.
- There’s SpaceX
Good luck X SEO and marketing team. There’s going to be a lot of work.
Things I look forward to seeing
How is this new brand going to be built?
We have a new brand name.
I want to see a mission, a vision, a story being built out.
I would love to see the visual and verbal system. I want to see not just the logo that it has that’s crowdsourced, but how is that system going to look like? How is it going to tell the story? Is it gonna be just cold and robotic black and white? What is that personality of the brand? Is it sweet? Is it cute? Is it a guide? A mentor? Or is it your best friend?
What’s the brand architecture? Is it going to be a parent brand? Is it going to have different products underneath it or just different features? Is Twitter going to live to some degree? or does he just hate the bird so much that it needs to die?
I would also love to see what is that path forward? what is that trajectory for the brand? is it going to have new products? is it new acquisition? new partnerships?
X, the name
I would love to see how meaning is interpreted from that. It’s very common, but the pro is that it’s simple. You’re able to intuit a lot of meanings into it.
- Is it the X on a treasurer hunt? it’s the spot where you bring excitement, you uncover new treasures.
- Is it closing out of other things so that this is the only platform that you need to come to? you can X out of all the other things in your life.
- Is it X like an x-ray of seeing something through to the inside and being with new perspectives?
There’s a lot of meaning that could be injected into it and I’d love to see that.
Is it going to bop or flop?
That all depends on everything that’s put into this new brand, and making it purposefully.
Twitter was a brand that people loved so if you’re killing it, you need to give them something new that people love. If the ambition is to make it a super app, an ecosystem, I’m curious what he’s going to do.
I’ll be interested to see more in the coming months. Right now, I’m still confused.
I want to be optimistic, I want to see him create something new.
Hopefully this was interesting and helpful to hear me analyze it from a brand strategist’s perspective.
This was my initial reaction, so let me know if there’s any questions or anything that you want to see me talk about in the future.
For now, that’s all. I’ll see you next time, bye!
