As a marketer it’s been fascinating, and more than a bit horrifying, to watch the recent rebrand of Twitter to “X” unfold. Others have said this as well: never have we seen a company take a flame thrower to its brand so quickly and thoroughly.
Elon Musk is a brilliant visionary who long will be remembered as one of the most consequential entrepreneurs in history. The man understands how to build brands. Tesla, SpaceX, and PayPal all achieved heights that few brands attain. I’ve been in marketing pretty much my whole career and while I’ve worked for some great brands and am proud of my accomplishments, I can’t hold a candle to what Musk has achieved.
Which makes the whole thing with Twitter so mystifying. Why would a brilliant guy do something so stupid?
I don’t know much about Musk beyond what I read in the press so I’m not going to attempt to get inside his head. But for those who have been following this story it’s a good lesson in brand management 101.
As an aside I have great sympathy for Linda Yaccarino, Twitter (or X’s) putative CEO. She clearly bit off way more than she can chew when she signed on to work for Musk. You can feel the whiplash she’s experiencing when you read her jargon-filled posts attempting to make sense of his impulsive decisions. I wonder if she’s missing the old days at NBC (although I’m sure the money eases a lot of the pain). If she’s still in the role a year from now I will be surprised.
Marketers tend to wax poetic and write overly precious strategy decks about their brands. They like to talk about a brand’s vision, promise and values as well as their emotional connection with consumers. Brand strategy decks can get very long and complicated, filled with excessive amounts of research, flowery writing, pretty pictures, and KPIs measuring every aspect of brand health. I’ve been guilty of this at times myself.
As a marketer I could explain why all those things matter and are a vital part of the best practices of managing any brand. But the truth is they can distract from the metric that matters most – awareness. Put more simply, have consumers or customers ever heard of you. Do they know your name? Because in the end people don’t buy products and services from companies they’ve never heard of.
For all its faults, Twitter had something almost impossible to buy: nearly universal unaided awareness. Even people who never used Twitter heard of it because of its ubiquitous presence in our culture, especially in sports and news.
Scott Galloway, the podcaster and NYU marketing professor, correctly pointed out that if you gave any marketer $10 billion dollars and ten years, they probably couldn’t achieve the level of unaided awareness that Twitter has right now.
As most marketers know (or should), name changes rarely work. Usually, the only reason to do them is because an acquisition or merger requires it.
When I was CMO at Time Warner Cable Media and we got bought by Charter, our team successfully rebranded the former TWCM markets to Spectrum Reach. In that case we didn’t have a choice, but it worked.
Admittedly name changes for B2B brands are easier because the universe of customers is smaller and more contained. However, I’ve dealt with this on the consumer side as well.
During my tenure as CMO at The Weather Channel we talked about changing the name. It something the company considered on and off for years. The reasons are many. Linear television is in decline. Ratings aren’t what they used to be. Having the word “channel” in the name makes the brand feel anachronistic. Does anyone under the age of 30 ever say the words “television channel” in a sentence? Even for older consumers, the word channel feels dated in the streaming age.
Also, the network’s breadth of coverage and content has evolved considerably since the network first launched in 1982. A name change could both modernize and reset the brand, as well as provide a cultural moment of focus that offers a chance for people to reconsider it. All of it sounds good on paper.
But then there’s this – The Weather Channel, like Twitter, has close to 100% name-recognition. Everybody has heard of it, even people who never interact with the brand. Moreover, unlike Twitter, The Weather Channel brand has repeatedly been recognized in multiple consumer surveys as one of the most trusted brands in the country. What’s so extraordinary about that is the other brands on that list spend exponentially more on marketing than The Weather Channel.
To echo Galloway’s point, even if you gave me the marketing budgets of one of those brands, I doubt that as CMO I could’ve pulled off a name change at The Weather Channel that would have replicated the awareness level, trust and respect it currently enjoys.
There are exceptions. I haven’t seen the metrics but Overstock’s recent rebrand to Bed, Bath & Beyond strikes me as inspired. It’s an interesting case study, almost like a reverse acquisition. BB&B went out of business. Overstock paid $21 million for the rights to a name that has higher awareness and more cache than its current brand, even though BB&B went belly up. What’s key is Overstock isn’t starting from scratch, but rather making an efficient investment to take possession of an existing, higher profile brand that has greater awareness than its own. Time will tell but it seems like a smart move.
As he’s done multiple times before, Elon Musk could prove the doubters like me wrong. There’s a reason he’s the richest man in the world and I’m not. But my hunch is in this case Musk succumbed to arrogance, impulsiveness, and delusion. Perhaps those things are an occupational hazard of such obscene wealth. I don’t know. But I think in the end the Twitter/X fiasco will be yet another example of the age-old lesson that applies to both life and business: there are some things money can’t buy.