Musk's Twitter rebrand and name change: will it be an Edsel?

 

Musk owns Space X. He shoots rockets into the air. Did he just shoot an arrow into the air and instead of a successful flight he killed the iconic bird of the company he overpaid for and turned into a purveyor of hate and lies?

By Hal Brown

Read on a single webpage here.

The very top illustration above showing the article which was the No 1 trending story from Time Magazine here.

Elon Musk Rebranded Twitter as 'X.' Users Immediately Rejected the Change

This is another Time article: 

By Turning Twitter Into X, Elon Musk Risks Killing Billions in Brand Value

Here's an excerpt:

Analysts and brand agencies call the product’s renaming a mistake. Twitter is one of the most recognizable social media brands, said Todd Irwin, founder of brand agency Fazer. Bird decals adorn small businesses and websites worldwide, alongside Instagram and Facebook logos.

Twitter’s popularity has also made verbs like “tweet” and “retweet” part of modern culture, used regularly to explain how celebrities, politicians and others communicated with the public, said Joshua White, assistant professor of finance at Vanderbilt University.

X will require the company to rebuild that cultural pull and linguistic consensus from scratch. But that may be part of the motivation, so users stop comparing Twitter post-takeover to what it was before. “It’s an exceptionally rare thing — in life or in business — that you get a second chance to make another big impression,” Yaccarino (an expert) tweeted.

Below are from the newly rebranded social network with Elon Musk's Xing (I guess we'll have to get used to that term instead of tweeting, kind of like Trump's "truthing" on Truth Social) that he enjoys negative feedback. Whether he's a mascochist or believes that bad publicity is better than no publicity can't be determined. It could be a bit of both.

As far as publicity goes, Musk certainly has gotten a lot of attention with this:

This all made me think of the 1985 failed New Coke so I did a web search and was surprised to see that there's a new new Coke and the rebranding of Twitter was featured in the search results. I was't the only one to think of New Coke when considering what Musk did. This is from the NY Post:

Elon Musk risks ‘New Coke’-style marketing blunder after ditching blue bird for ‘X’ logo

It turns out that there's a new New Coke:

Coca-Cola Launching Bizarre New Flavor

Will the new new Coke be the rousing success despite the failure of the old New Coke that CocaCola hopes it will be? Time will tell. The same holds for the rebranded Twitter. However there's a big difference between the two products. Brand introductions in large successful corporations usually aren't made to satisfy the ego of one person. They are made with careful deliberation between innovators and a marketing team. Edsel Ford didn't come back from the grave and decide a car should be named for him. 

Will X be an Edsel? Perhaps it will be come to be called the Xsel. The new Ford Motor Company car was advertised to be the car of the future. Here's what Wikipedia says about why Edsel failed:

Historians have advanced several theories in an effort to explain Edsel's failure. Popular culture often faults vehicle styling. Consumer Reports has alleged that poor workmanship was Edsel's chief problem. Marketing experts hold Edsels up as a supreme example of the corporate culture's failure to understand American consumers. Business analysts cite the weak internal support for the product inside Ford's executive offices. According to author and Edsel scholar Jan Deutsch, an Edsel was "the wrong car at the wrong time."

Most people couldn't identify the Edsel logo which to me looks like an open mouth.  At least it was unique unlike the new X.

I think the Edsel grill, which came to represent the car, was just plain ugly even compared to the Ford built Mercury.

 

Will X be an Edsel? Stay tuned...

Addendum:

In 2020 Musk named one of his chuldren  X Æ A-Xii.  is considered a letter in Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic and and Faroese and is prounced as a long E sound. (Reference) I assume his name is pronunced XeeA, or Exy-A and for formal introductions he'd be XeeA the seventh.

His wife, the Canadian singer Grimes, real name Claire Boucher, explained the name's meaning to her fans.The singer  has used Æ before, naming a song on her latest album 4ÆM.

The A-12 is a Lockheed plane built for the CIA. It was known by designers during its development as Archangel.

She also claims Archangel is her favourite song but does not explain who the song is by.

I wonder how the child will do when he reaches school age.

Perhaps since Elon loves X so much he should change his own name. Of course, Malcolm Little did it when he change his name successfully to Malcolm X, someone I doubt Elon is a fan of.  This probably rules out him changing his name to Elon X although it does have a ring to it.

Prince ended up being called the artist formerly known as Prince even after he changed his name to a symbol that had no pronunciation. 

Cassius Clay paid homage to his friend and mentor Malcolm X when he changed his name to Muhammad Ali although throughout the 1960's the media referred to him by what he called his slave name. (Reference)

Thanks to everyone who read this far. I know that I have a habit of digressing into lengthy afterthoughts only tangenital to my main blog story.