Elon Musk has had a bumpy ride rebranding the more-than-a-decade-old ‘Twitter’ to the ethereal letter ‘X’. Last Monday, workers erected a crane and began removing the giant letters ‘Twitter’ at the company’s San Francisco headquarters. The problem was necessary permissions like blocking a busy street had not been taken. Result: the police department swooped down and stopped the work leaving the half-torn sineage with the letters ‘er’!
Half a hemisphere away, in Indonesia, there was more trouble. The Islamic country ordered the site to be blocked as it could be taken as a porn site. Indonesia has strict laws restricting pornography and gambling and it was not very happy with what the rebranded X.com conjures up.
Elon Musk and his team have been mulling Twitter’s rebrand for some time. The object is, they say, to turn Twitter into a super app – something like China’s WeChat – for hyper-connected people that can do “everything” from access to podcasts, to shopping and watching videos.
“The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth – like birds tweeting – but now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video… and the ability to conduct your entire financial world,” says an Elon Musk post. “The Twitter name does not make sense in that context, so we must bid adieu to the bird,” Musk said.
Musk’s obsession
For the billionaire Musk, the letter ‘X’ has been an obsession. But it could well be the undoing of the $44 billion property he acquired last year. In his early business days, Elon Musk co-founded the online bank ‘X.com’ in 1999, then merged it with rival Confinity to rebrand the merged venture as PayPal. Musk tried to convince the company to christen PayPal as ‘X-PayPal’. The idea was market-tested but dropped after customers said it sounded like porn.
Even after, Musk did not give up on ‘X’ and used it liberally for a string of products including his space venture ‘Space X’ and Tesla’s ‘Model X’.Apart from the owner’s infatuation with the letter ‘X’, is there any reason why ‘Twitter’ should be rebranded? Twitter logs 450 million users on a monthly basis. As many as 52% of its users are Gen Z or 25 years or less.
As a brand, it has high penetration; and though as not as large as Meta or Google, it has followers who are high net worth, and are super active communicators. As a brand, it has evolved successfully – with many hiccups of course – over 17 years since 2006. For the celebrity, it is the fashionable go-to space. So what is wrong with Brand Twitter?
There seems to be no logical answer. Why should one rebrand something that is doing fine? Brands have a complex value that takes decades to build. Bloomberg estimates the change from the blue-bird logo to a black ‘X’, may cost Elon Musk anything between $4 and $20 billion in brand value.
Rebranding not easy
For most of the internet community, Musk dismantling Twitter is a thumbs-down. Most likened X.com to a porn app. The ‘Daily Beast’ quoted one user saying it reminded him of “an app for a membership-only human trafficking gentlemen’s club headquartered in Budapest.” And despite all the efforts to kill Twitter, it is alive and kicking. The ‘Tweet’ button and ‘Search Twitter’ icons are still live, and the ‘bird-related paraphernalia’ persists online.
Rebranding is a difficult exercise. Companies rebrand when the old logo and image are faltering and pulling down sales. An example of successful branding in recent months has been US food giant Dunkin’ Donuts. The company decided to put out a more modern face and drop ‘Donuts’. The assumption was Dunkin’ had become synonymous with Donuts and therefore the latter was superfluous. The gamble paid off. The takeaway: the company kept ‘Dunkin’ for its strong recall.
On the other hand, British Petroleum (BP) rebranding in 2000 to portray a ‘green-friendly’ company did not work. Replacing its ‘BP’ logo after 70 years with a green sun – the symbol of Helios, the Greek God of the Sun – was aimed at pitching an environment-friendly mission; but the branding did not match reality. BP was later involved in an oil spillin the Gulf of Mexica, the worst the world has ever seen.
There are also numerous successful brands that are stupidly killed causing great loss to the company. A looming case at home in that of ‘Vistara’ – a brand the Tata Group has developed as a luxe airline with high standards of service. After 8 years, the company now wants to kill the brand by merging Vistara with Air India.
There is also the case of Coca-Cola trying to boost Coke by killing ‘Thums Up’ after it acquired the brand from Ramesh Chouhan of the Parle Group in 1993. Ironically, the demand for the unique flavour was so strong, Thums Up refused to die, and it continued to beat Coke in sales. One hopes Twitter will follow the Thums Up trajectory.