Does Twitter's rebrand to X spell the beginning of the end for the social media platform?
Andy Greenaway - the creative director at independent agency Rumble Creative and formerly chief creative officer at Dentsu Singapore, APAC chief creative officer at Saatchi & Saatchi and group chairman of Ogilvy & Mather - took to LinkedIn to share three reasons why he thinks Twitter/X will be dead in the next 18 months.
"Brands are fragile entities. You can’t screw around with them. Because when you do, it can often be deadly (for the brand that is)," he said.
"Elon Musk, as you’re well aware by now, has scrapped the famous Twitter name, logo and iconic blue bird – as well as the vernacular that has been built up in the consumer’s mind for over a decade. No more Tweets. Just X's (yuck).
"Also, it seems that Musk has been a bit cheapskate in developing his new brand identity. According to Twitter user @Fontendou, the logo is actually the X glyph from Monotype’s Special Alphabet 4 and is currently available to buy on their website. Even more hilariously, Musk might have only spent a measly $30 on the brand’s new mark."
Greenaway said that fundamentally, the move shows that Musk has little knowledge of how a brand works, with the creative director saying the first reason X is "doomed to fail" is due to one of the tenets of brand building being consistency.
"People build an emotional attachment to brands. When you change a brand's face, you create a stranger," he said.
"You’re asking a consumer to start the relationship from scratch. Most happy to move on and find a new partner to tango with.
"The timing of the rebrand coincides with the launch of Meta’s Threads. That new partner is looking sexy and attractive. Hopping out of the X bed and into the Threads bunk is going to be an easy decision to make for most people. Musk's timing couldn't worse.
"The brand personality of Twitter has changed with Musk’s takeover. It has become darker, more right wing and more divisive.
"The X branding, and its sinister aura (in my view), is a perfect match for the new personality. It's going to put people off. The old Twitter identity gave the brand a softer edge. It had equity that consumers could still hang onto in the hope that one day sanity would come back to the platform. Any hope of that happening has been vanquished. Watch out for the exodus."
In the comments of Greenaway's post, Sanjay Kapoor, VP of business development at Medprime Technologies in Mumbai, India, said what Musk seems to overlook is the fact that when a brand becomes a verb, it has the greatest retention.
"E.g., just tweet it or just Google it etc etc," said Kapoor.
Graham Robertson, founder and CEO of Beloved Brands Inc. in Toronto, Canada, said that quite a few users of Twitter were on the fence on whether to leave or not.
"We kinda thought "well, I have been using Twitter for 10 years, I sorta feel connected...I think I might leave, but it's hard to leave.", he said.
"Changing the brand erases all that connectivity that has been holding people back from leaving...and it will be easier for many to leave."
Doreen Chan, a former group account director at OgilvyOne in Shanghai, China, said there are people who just don't understand (or maybe choose not to know) that brand, like family wealth, takes ages to grow and flourish.
"And not to mention taking good care of to maintain/strive in the ever changing social sentiments/economic climates," she said.
"In this case of Twitter (in the era of Musk), I hope he has calculated the losses, or at least the shareholders to twitter are ready for the losses to come."
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