The question about X is Y
Anyone looking for logic behind Twitter’s rebrand is unlikely to find it.
A lot of people in tech, business, and especially marketing this week are utterly confounded about Elon Musk’s inexplicable decision to rebrand Twitter as X.
Celebrity marketing professor Scott Galloway predicted on the Pivot podcast this week that “this will go down as one of the strangest decisions in the history of brand strategy…it is very hard to justify this.”
His Pivot co-host, tech journalist Kara Swisher, also commented on Twitter–er, X: “Rebranding HBO to Max was the dumbest rebrand in recent history. Elon: Hold my beer and/or whatever is being partaken at 3 am.”
And there are many more great critiques where these came from. Mark Ritson’s 12 reasons why Twitter’s rebrand is a mistake offers one of my favorites, that is it bad in part “…because X has a ton of negative, dark connotations that probably make it the 26th best letter to use.”
I’ll just point out that that Musk was already well along in his mission to rebrand Twitter. What he bought in October 2022 for $44 billion (around the time it was valued at a third of that) was a high-performing, incrementally optimized platform with an enormous, trusting user base and a robust, if not quite profitable, advertising business.
What he’s turned it into is a shell of its former self–lacking critical personnel, hemorrhaging advertisers, buried in debt, and infested with ‘blue check’ trolls who can now purchase the former symbol of verification via an $8 month Twitter Blue subscription. Elon is actively working to change the Twitter experience that so many people used and appreciated into something else.
But what is that ‘something else’? According to this word salad from their recently hired human shield/CEO Linda Yaccarino, it’s an app that will be able to do, well, everything.
The Twitter rebrand runs counter to conventional brand strategy wisdom: he’s taken over a highly recognized and differentiated product, and by gradually degrading the service and now re-naming it something as generic as X, is effectively erasing all the equity and goodwill that made it worth buying for $44 million (or at least, a third of that). He’s de-branding one of the strongest brands out there.
But why, we wonder? Many see it as hubris: boneheaded decision-making by an omnipotently wealthy tech titan, surrounded by yes men and women unwilling or unable to push back on their mercurial boss.
It also could be more intentional than we are giving him credit for. Perhaps he bought Twitter not because he loves it but because he hated many aspects of it, and was motivated by a potential he imagined. Never mind that this potential has never been clearer than vague references to free speech, reducing spam and misinformation, and “helping humanity”; and while his fans and supporters may hold faith he’s got a master plan, it’s just as possible there’s no ‘there’ there.
But it is a good moment for us to consider the drastic measure of rebranding–when to do it, and why do it at all. Because it has consequences for better and for worse, whether it’s Google becoming Alphabet, HBO Max rebranding to Max, or Facebook becoming Meta.
What Zuckerberg did with the Facebook-to-Meta rebrand may have seemed cynical in the moment, but at least provided them a diversion at a time they were hounded by negative publicity. Now, with Meta’s Twitter copycat Threads capitalizing on Twitter’s deterioration, Zuckerberg can thank Elon for making him look like a competent and benevolent social media platform genius who can restore for the masses what they loved about Twitter.
Ultimately, whatever Elon is doing with Twitter is a lot more complex and consequential than rebranding, which usually amounts to little more than an aesthetic makeover. Even then, for an established brand anywhere near the top of their category, it comes across as a desperate measure, a last resort when your reputation needs a reboot. If that’s what Elon’s trying to do here, he’s succeeding.
The rebranding of Twitter has a lot of people scratching their heads and wondering why, but given his track record of inexplicable decisions with Twitter–starting with buying it in the first place–the best answer we can come up with right now may just be ‘because Elon’.
