X: Twitter’s branding gamble

Rebrands aren’t easy, with successful examples typically relying on long-term planning, and significant investment – Twitter, facing new competition and a tough advertising market, is the latest major brand to attempt the move, using a letter that owner Elon Musk appears to be especially fond of: X.

As of Monday, the site remains Twitter.com, but it now bears an ‘X’ as its logo (pictured) rather than the long-standing silhouette of a bird. It follows an announcement from Musk over the weekend, along with an injunction to followers for some crowd-sourced graphic design. “If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make go live worldwide tomorrow” [sic], Musk wrote.

Why it matters

Re-brandings are very difficult to pull off, but they tend to be that much harder when there appears to be less strategy than sentiment. Case in point: how does Twitter Blue, the site’s new paid verification feature, sound when recast as ‘X Blue’? Particularly when it will be showing up on bank statements.

Yet, the scale of press coverage for the re-brand is on a scale that few other brands could attract, so it’s likely that many people will be made aware. What’s more complicated is whether the public in all its complexity and unpredictability will actually heed the change.

But there’s a much bigger issue here around trust and how to build it. If the company’s super app ambitions are to be believed, a financial or payments layer will have to be trusted in order to be used. It’s likely that a route back to this level of trust will be costly at a time when the company is struggling to retain advertisers.

A sudden change

“It’s an exceptionally rare thing – in life or in business – that you get a second chance to make another big impression”, wrote Twitter/X Corp CEO Linda Yaccarino on Twitter.

But this move is bigger, Yaccarino claims: “X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.”

The FT reports that Yaccarino spent part of the weekend explaining the new vision at a conference of mobile marketers in Napa

Again, one of the biggest issues facing the company at the moment is a perception of unpredictability, which is not what advertisers want from their spending destinations.

“Musk's continuous tinkering with Twitter has caused frustration among its loyal users,” noted Chloe Cox, head of social at Wunderman Thompson Commerce, commenting on the news.

“The imposed limit on the number of tweets that can be read daily was met with ire from both users and marketers, sparking a boon for Threads to amass 100 million sign-ups within five days of launch.”

A history of X

It’s well-known that Musk is deeply fond of ‘X’, with one of his early companies also called X.com until it merged with then-PayPal owner Confinity in 2000; later, he would name his spaceflight company SpaceX and debut a Model  X as part of his electric car company Tesla.

In 2017, when Musk bought back the domain name of X.com, he was quite clear that there were “no plans right now, but it has great sentimental value to me.”

Fast-forward to late 2022, and the idea had started to take form as the basis of an “everything app”, broadly modelled on Tencent’s WeChat, which hosts messaging as well as payments and online shopping capabilities, based on the Twitter infrastructure. 

Sourced from Twitter/X, The Verge, WARC, FT

[Image: Twitter/X]