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Over the weekend, Elon Musk announced a major change for Twitter. We all hoped it was a joke, that he wouldn’t actually change the name of such a well-established brand. But as we’ve all come to see, he was quite serious.
With the support of CEO Linda Yaccarino, Musk has changed the name of Twitter to X.
While opinions about the rebrand ranged from confusion to annoyance, it seems like no X users, or those on its competitor Threads, is a fan of the rebrand, and for good reason. Not only was the change unnecessary, it also disregarded the years of brand work that had been done.
Some platform that I used to know
Since Twitter’s debut in 2006, a certain vocabulary associated with the brand (retweets, tweeps) along with its recognizable blue bird logo, were rapidly adopted by users. That type of brand advocacy usually takes years to build. Yet within 24 hours, it was all gone… for a single letter.
Over the past few months since the ownership transition in October, we’ve all seen the change in the site’s advertisers. Gone are the Diet Coke, Express and upcoming rom-com ads I was often served in my feed; instead, it’s filled with obscure brands that do not fit my personal buyer persona. Rather than being served a Barbie ad in my feed this weekend, I’ve been served ads for obscure credit cards and b-to-b cybersecurity companies.
Ditching the brand equity of Twitter overnight makes users and advertisers question the decision-making of the brand. Was there a well through-out plan? It’s hard (or easy) to tell by the lack of updates across the platform; even a Google search performed at 4:30 p.m. on Monday still showed Twitter as the main domain. (Not to mention that the Twitter sign on the platform’s headquarters couldn’t even be taken down on Monday due to a lack of a permit.)