- Elon Musk Replaces Twitter Logo with Art Deco X
- Rebranding to Transform Twitter into an “Everything App”
- Uncertainty Surrounds the Success of X as Twitter’s Branding
The tweeting blue avian, one of the most recognizable logos on the web, is no longer present. Will the black and white X that replaces it be a branding masterstroke or a disaster?
When marketing professor Jean-Pierre Dube heard that billionaire Elon Musk was replacing Twitter’s logo with an Art Deco-style X, he assumed it was a joke.
Why would you take a well-known brand with a substantial amount of brand equity and throw it away and start from scratch?” Professor Dube of the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago stated as much. Short-term, it appears strange.
However, could it succeed in the long term?
Last year’s seizure of Twitter by Mr. Musk was detrimental to the social media platform.
Mr. Musk stated this month that advertising revenue has decreased by half, as major brands have pulled back in response to changes he has implemented, such as how the company manages verified accounts and moderates content. Additionally, abrupt termination and unpaid bills have led to negative press and lawsuits.
Fidelity, which has a stake in the company, estimates that Twitter is now worth only a third of the $44 billion (£34.3 billion) that Elon Musk paid for it in October.
Brand Finance recently estimated that the company’s brand was worth $3.9 billion, a 32% decrease from the previous year, which it attributed to Mr. Musk’s “aggressive business approaches.”
According to Yanhui Zhao, a marketing professor at the University of Nebraska Omaha, rebranding can be profitable, especially when a company is in difficulty or wants to change its direction.
His analysis of 215 rebranding announcements by publicly traded companies revealed that more than half of these companies experienced positive returns after rebranding.
The multi-billionaire’s ambition to transform Twitter into an “everything app” similar to China’s WeChat, a social messaging service on which users can, among other things, transmit money, hail taxis, book hotels, and play games, therefore, may be timely.
“This rebranding is necessary due to Twitter’s strategic reorientation,” he said.
Professor of marketing at the Questrom School of Business at Boston University, Shuba Srinivasan, cautioned that success is less likely when a company is in turmoil. Given all the social media competitors, such as Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads, vying to fill Twitter’s role, she deemed it a particularly hazardous move.
“The rebranding will likely confirm the fears of many Twitter users that Musk’s acquisition marked the end of the Twitter they knew,” she said.
Prof. Dube added that it is unclear whether a rebranding would solve Twitter’s problems, many of which originate in part from Mr. Musk.
“I didn’t think there was as much of a brand problem and brand identity problem as there was a leadership problem,” he stated.
Mr. Musk foreshadowed the change in a May interview with the satire website The Babylon Bee, stating that he believed he needed to “broaden the branding for Twitter” to help him succeed in expanding the company beyond the short text posts that made it renowned.
However, some analysts stated that the likelihood of this vision’s fulfillment is low.
In June, the advisory firm Forrester Research published a report titled “The super app window has closed,” which asserted that tech giants such as Google and Apple currently offer super app-like features to billions of users in the United States and Europe, while regulatory hurdles and fierce competition limit opportunities for others.
It was noted that WeChat, the example cited by Mr. Musk, became dominant in China before other payment services emerged, in part due to technical issues such as limited phone memory that discouraged the downloading of multiple applications.
“While Musk’s vision is to turn X into an ‘everything app,’ this takes time, money, and people – three things that the company no longer has,” Mike Proulx, a research director at Forrester, wrote after Mr. Musk’s announcement, adding that he believed the company would close or be acquired within the next 12 months.
Even if Twitter’s primary users in media, politics, and finance remain loyal, as they have in the past, the success of X would require participation from a much larger user base, according to Andy Wu, a professor at Harvard Business School.
He added that Twitter encountered difficulties before Mr. Musk’s takeover and would benefit from taking some risks.
“We can debate whether these modifications are in the right direction, but Twitter does require modifications.”
