• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, August 1, 2023

Elon Musk has made his mark. Twitter and its cute little birdy logo are dead. Like Monty Python’s famous parrot, this bird has shuffled off its mortal coil.

So Twitter is dead, Long live X?

I know -- that seems weird to me, too.

Musk clearly has a thing for the letter X. He founded a company called X.com that merged with PayPal in 2000. In his portfolio of companies, you’ll find SpaceX, xAI, X Corp. Its seldom you see so much devotion to 1/26^th of the Latin alphabet.

It’s not unprecedented to pick a letter and turn it into a brand. Steve Jobs managed to make the letter “i” the symbol for everything Apple. Mind you, he also tacked on helpful product descriptors to keep us from getting confused. If he had changed the name of Apple to “I” and just left it at that, it might not have worked so well.

At their best, brands should immediately bridge the gap between the DNA of a company and a long-term niche in the brains of those of us in the marketplace. Twitter did that. When you saw the iconic bird logo or hear the word Twitter, you know exactly what it referred to.

This is easier when the company is known for a handful of products. But when companies stretch into multiple areas, it’s tough to make one brand synonymous with hundreds or thousands of products. 

This brand diffusion is common with the hyper-accelerated world of tech. You launch a product and it's so successful, it becomes a mega-corporation. At some point you’re stuck with an awkward transition: You leave the original brand associated with that product and create an umbrella brand that is vague enough to shelter a diverse and expanding portfolio of businesses. That's why Google created the generic Alpha brand, and why Facebook became Meta.

But Musk didn’t create an umbrella to shelter Twitter and its brand. He used it to beat the brand to death. Maybe he just doesn’t like blue birds.

When a brand does its job well, we feel a personal relationship with it. Twitter’s brand did this. It was unique in tech branding, primarily because it was cute and organic. It was an accessible brand, a breath of fresh air in a world of cryptic acronyms and made-up terms with weird spellings. It made sense to us. And we are sorry to see it go.

In fact, some of us are flat-out refusing to admit the bird is dead. One programmer has already whipped together a Chrome extension that strips out the X branding and brings our favorite little Tweeter back from the beyond. Much as I admire this denial, I suspect this is only delaying the inevitable. It’s time to say bye-bye birdy. 

This current backlash against Musk’s rebranding could be a natural outcome of his effort to move from being one tied to a product to one that creates a bigger tent for multiple products. He has been pretty vocal about X becoming an “everything” app, a la China’s WeChat.

I suspect the road to making X a viable brand is going to be a rocky one. First of all, if you were going to pick the most generic symbol imaginable, X would be your choice. It literally has been a stand in for pretty much everything you could think of for centuries now. Even my great, great grandfather signed his name with an “X.”

We Hotchkisses have always been ahead of our time.

But the ubiquity of “X” brings up another problem, this time on the legal front. According to a lengthy analysis of Twitter’s rebranding by Emma Roth, you can trademark a single letter, but trying to make X your brand will come with some potentially litigious baggage. Microsoft has a trademark on X. So does Meta.

As long at Musk’s X sticks to its knitting, that might not be a problem. Microsoft registered X for its Xbox gaming console. Meta’s trademark also has to do with gaming. Apparently, as long as you don’t cross industries and confuse customers, having the same trademark shouldn’t be an issue.

But the chances of Elon Musk playing nice and following the rules of trademark law while pursuing his plan for world domination are somewhat less than zero. In this case, I think it’s fair to speculate that the formula for the future will be: X = a shitload of lawyer fees. 

Also, even if you succeed in making X a recognized and unique brand, protecting that brand will be a nightmare. How do you build a legal fence around X when the choice of it as a brand was literally to tear down fences?

But maybe Musk has already foreseen all this. Maybe he has some kind of superpower to see things we can’t.

Kind of like Superman’s X-Ray vision.