Now That Elon Musk Officially Rebranded Twitter to X, the Experts are Calling it 'Marketing Suicide'
Jaap Arriens. Shutterstock Images.As Karim pointed out yesterday, Elon Musk choosing this exact moment to rebrand one of the most iconic sites the internet has yet produced seems like the actions of a madman. Like HBO Max dropping the 'HBO,' and millions of subscribers along with it. Only worse.
I'll admit I'm just a simpleton who strings grammatically mediocre sentences into a keyboard for a living. When it comes to any objective measurement of success, I can't hold a flickering candle to Musk. He's hundreds of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of electric cars, dozens of space launches, one vast satellite network, and a gigantic social media site up on me. And that gap isn't getting any narrower. So far be it for me to question his business acumen. Or that of the executive he brought on to dam up the flood of ad revenue he lost once he made the purchase and started loosening up the rules on censorship:
He and she are well educated, experienced, successful and presumably blessed with a great deal of business savvy. Whereas I got a C in Marketing at a state college and have never tried to run so much as a food truck. So don't go by me. But this feels like a uniquely awful time to mess with the one major asset they have, which is the Twitter brand itself. Mark Zuckerberg just launched Threads as a direct competitor. So much so, that Musk is threatening to sue him. I can't speak to how successful Threads, or whether it met Meta's expectations so far. But if it hasn't, it's got as much to do with the familiarity we've developed with Musk's platform over 17 years.
When news breaks, it's the first place a lot of us go to. If there's a major event to be followed like, say, a sports draft, Twitter the automatic choice. It's reflexive at this point. You don't even think about it. Plus it's become the shorthand for describing the awfulness of people in general and their online presence writ large. "Twitter is going to be insane today. Twitter is dark and full of terrors. I'm sick of arguing with idiots on Twitter." The name itself is to social media what Band-Aids is to bandages or Kleenex is to snot rags. So it seems insane to change the verbiage at this point. Are Musk and Yaccarino expecting us to stop saying Tweet, re-Tweet, Live Tweet, Twitter followers, Tweeps, Twitter trolls, Promoted Tweet, Twitter accounts, or Twitter polls? Because telling someone, "Post that on X" sounds more like a math equation or a football passing play than anything to do with expressing yourself to anonymous weirdos.
But don't take my word for it. Listen to the people who allegedly understand such things:
Daily Mail - Richard Michie, the CEO and founder of The Marketing Optimist, simply called the rebrand: 'absolute marketing suicide'.
Not holding back over his view of Musk's marketing strategy, Michie said: 'Since he took over Twitter in what must be the most misguided takeover of the business in history, Elon Musk has been giving a masterclass in how to kill a brand with death by a thousand cuts.
He called Twitter under Musk's ownership 'a total basket case' that 'adds zero value to advertisers'.
Michie said a better approach would have been for Musk to 'double down on the brand' and 'build on the legacy and user base'. …
Other experts understood the reasoning behind Musk's approach
Tom Anderson, a Hummingbird Agency director, said the rebrand came across as a 'last-ditch effort to salvage the platform's declining reputation'. …
"I share the sentiment that this rebrand alone may not be enough to address the underlying issues. Twitter has long been plagued by its association with toxicity and harassment. A mere change in logo and name cannot erase the negative perceptions and experiences users have encountered on the platform.' …
Think3's Amey Hellen said: 'A brand that has been around for almost two plus decades being wiped out overnight does not feel like the smartest choice, however, it is very fitting for the controversial entrepreneur.
Aligning with Musk's own aims for the proposed 'everything app', Hellen said: 'I think this is just the beginning of what is to come for this app.'
Short Story Ventures' Danny Matthews also appeared to heap praise on Musk for his decision to shake up the platform.
'It makes absolute sense to me that he wants to rebrand away from a social media platform and instead, expand X into an app that integrates with the rest of your life,' Matthews said. …
However, Matthews added the caveat that it was 'never a good idea to rebrand on a whim without any real communication' but he said 'Musk is an anomaly in pretty much everything he does.'
Generally speaking, I respect the hell of out Musk, crackpot though he may be. I stand by my assertion when he bought Twitter that it was a selfless act of patriotism, putting $44 billion of his own fortune on the line because he didn't like the way legitimate speech was being suppressed in what many consider to be the modern "town square." And even though he's had to course correct as he's gone along, once he figured out deep pocketed corporations don't want their ads to appear right after images of some guy's dick or the imagery of a certain political party that came to power in Western Europe in the 1930s, I think his goal is an altruistic one.
Still, this is a bold move indeed. One that clearly all the so-called experts are pretty much in agreement on when they say it's risky, crazy, and downright reckless. Though probably necessary, given what a fabulous disaster Twitter has become over the last decade or so. I'm sure it's not the first time he made a ballsy move that all the experts said was insane. After all, what's a bigger gamble than putting all your money into filling a metal tube with rocket fuel, putting people on top, and igniting it in hopes they'll reach the International Space Station? As Schopenhauer said, "Talent hits a target no one can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see." This particular genius has been right a lot more often than he's been wrong. And right way more often than the marketing experts. Either way, it's going to be fascinating to see how this plays out.
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For now though, they've still got a lot of shit to clean up:
