Elon Musk's sudden rebranding of Twitter to “X” has erased 15 years of brand recognition, leaving the platform in a challenging position as it starts again from scratch, while its competitors forge ahead.
So what's next?
⚰️ RIP Twitter (2007 – 2023)
Research firm Forrester foresees a grim fate for “X,” releasing a paper last night predicting X will shut down or be acquired within the next 12 months.
Nine days ago, Musk “tweeted” (can we still say this?) that the company has a negative cash flow because of a 50% drop in ad revenue plus “heavy debt load.” This is far from a position of strength from which to attempt what is essentially an app relaunch — a move that will only alienate more users and more advertisers.
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. Disenfranchised Twitter users will increasingly turn to Threads while Musk’s company continues to lose money.
Simply put, X’s runway is coming to an end.
Doug Zarkin is a retail brand marketing executive, most recently CMO for a major eyewear retailer, and was vice-president of marketing at Victoria's Secret. I spoke with him earlier today.
The challenge becomes how the users of the platform are going to react. There seems to be more negative reaction than positive reaction. The work that needs to be done with that platform has absolutely nothing to do with the visual language.
The challenges that marketers have faced since the change in leadership is the change in behavior and values that the platform has put out into the market. Limiting what you see as a user of the platform inevitably changes the value proposition because you are now really looking at a finite audience for exposure for your message, for your product or service.
Doug Zarkin's book called “Moving Your Brand Out of the Friend Zone” will be out later in the year.
And now, the nonsense.
A couple of random items overnight that I thought were funny:
It doesn't appear that the platform controls the username X. It's on a locked account, which claims to be in San Francisco, and as of this afternoon had about 27,000 followers. Of course, if this is NOT owned by the platform, they'll probably just bump whoever has it out.
They also don't own the trademark for X. In fact (and this is kind of hilarious), its arch-rival Meta appears to hold that trademark, for “online social networking services” and “social networking services in the fields of entertainment, gaming, and application development.” The Meta X looks different — it's the former logo for Mixer, which was a Twitch competitor owned by Microsoft before they shut that streaming service down and came to some kind of agreement with Meta.
For a while last night a screenshot of Twitter's help page was circulating, saying that the right way to refer to a post is no longer a tweet, but a “xeet” — turns out that was fake.
And finally, yesterday, Twitter workers started taking that name off their building in San Francisco, only to have the police shut them down because they didn't have a permit for the crane. For the last few months, Twitter's logo actually read “Titter” because Elon is a 12-year-old edgelord. Now, it just reads “Er.”
Images: Canva / X
