One of the more curious marketing – make that business – case studies currently playing out is over at the headquarters of ‘the platform formerly known as Twitter’. That is to say, ‘X’.
Recently, Elon Musk ticked off the final item of his Twitter clean-up. After paying $44 billion USD for the social media platform in 2022, Musk fired most of the staff, thrown out most of the code, and openly re-engaged with some of the more extreme voices across the globe.
And now he’s got rid of the brand itself – not just the logo mind you, but the entire name.
So, we say bye bye to Larry the blue bird (famously named after US basketball legend Larry Bird), and hello to ‘X’.
(We are also saying goodbye to Twitter and ‘tweeting’ – from now on, those microblogs we post on the platform will be known as ‘x’s.)
Takes some getting used to, doesn’t it?
So clever we don’t understand it?
Sometimes, acts of true genius are often misunderstood by us mere mortals, who lack the vision and courage to stray outside traditional – and possibly outdated – conventions such as strategic clarity, brand equity, and client centricity.
And there is certainly a chance that in years to come, Musk’s singlehanded ‘renovation’ of Twitter, sorry, X, will be seen as business brilliance.
But I somehow doubt it.
Don’t get me wrong. He paid a lot of money for that business. He should be able to do with it what he wants, and if that means incinerating $44 billion invalue and killing off one of the most recognised brands on the planet – a cultural phenomenon – then that’s his prerogative.
Afterall, apart from a brief flirtation with profitability in 2018 and 2019, Twitter has been a loss-making machine. So, a bit of scorched earth – as we have seen with him sacking around 70% of staff and defaulting on rent on its offices around the world – is probably understandable.
Except the financial results have got worse since he took over. Revenues have halved and by June 2023 the value of the company was down by two thirds.
So, is there actually method amongst what seems like madness?
From a strategic point of view, Musk has been vague, flagging his intent to evolve X from a social media platform into an app for and of everything. A bit like China’s WeChat, only bigger.
Fair enough, I guess. Although in paying tens of billions for the platform formerly known as Twitter, you would have to presume he saw some inherent value in the business. And if it wasn’t the brand, then it must have been the 350 million active users.
Platform inertia could certainly explain some of his thinking. We are all time poor and starting up on a whole new platform feels like it would take a lot of headspace which we don’t have. And besides, many of us have spent years cultivating and curating our feed and our followers. Who can be bothered starting again?
Quite a few of us it seems.
As soon as Meta – the people behind Facebook – launched X competitor Threads, 100 million new users signed up. Daily usage did however drop off from its peak of 44 million, and by its own admission there are areas where its functionality and experience lag behind those of ‘X’, but it still seemed like an encouraging start.
Expert ‘hot take’
Scanning the reactions, beyond the emotionally charged rants it is instructive to see what well credentialled business and branding people are saying. And while there is certainly a range of views, most of them fall into two categories – critical, or puzzled.
Musk’s Twitter rebrand is an “exceptionally risky move” as it jettisons 15 years of brand value and forces him to build a new brand from scratch, Forrester vice president and research director Mike Proulx told Forbes, a task he said is “no small feat.”
Well known Australian marketing commentator, Professor Mark Ritson, simply said “It’s a mistake”.
The only level on which I look at what Musk has done and say ‘that’s cool’ is the way he crowdsourced the design for the X logo.
That’s right, after initially launching a new brand AND logo, he tweeted a shout out for Twitter/x users to submit designs for an improved version, promising to make it go live if he received a design he liked. True to his word, he did, likely making some aspiring graphic designer delirious with joy in the process, (although he subsequently reverted back to the original one shortly after).
So, what to make of all this?
Respect your audience, provide a safe space, and solve their problems
As the custodians of the largest, most engaged advice community platform in Australia, we take our community stewardship role very seriously. In the nine years since we started, our community has grown to almost 8,000 members and 1 in 3 advisors. We have grown this far by respecting our audience, by providing a safe space for advisers to share and collaborate and grow, but most of all by providing solutions to their most pressing challenges and problems.
Unlike Musk, we aren’t relying on inertia to keep people on the platform, we are working with corporate partners to provide them content which involves them investing their time, rather than spending their time.
Like Musk, we rely on the community for insights. By tapping into the thousands of advisor conversations taking place across the Ensombl platform, we can identify advisers most pressing issues and challenges. The content we develop to solve those issues and challenges is, in effect, co-created with our community.
The lift in responsiveness – the co-creation dividend – is around 45%.
That’s right, across our various channels, including podcasts, articles, and research papers, content co-created with advisors is 45% more responsive than standard corporate content.
It’s an approach which allows you to drive higher marketing ROI, while building your reputation as a trusted and credible authority.
Now that’s worth tweeting xing about.
If you think you have a solution to advisor problem, get in touch and find out how your brand and offering might benefit from the co-creation dividend.
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