Will X Ever ACTUALLY Catch On?

TL;DR:

Its been about two months since twitter rebranded to X, and I’m not gonna lie to you, I still can’t bring myself to call twitter X or call a tweet an X or whatever you’re supposed to say. Now If you’re like me, you’re probably wondering, will this whole X thing actually ever catch on? Will we ever stop saying twitter and just say X?

In this article we’re going through history to try and find an example of how this may play out.

The brand awareness around tweeting and retweeting extends beyond the users of the platform. You don’t have to be on twitter to know what a tweet or retweet is and just about everyone recognizes the blue bird logo.

Now there really aren’t a whole lot of examples of a brand with as much brand equity and awareness of twitter doing a complete rebrand. Think about it, what other brand that has become a part of our day to day lingo changed the lingo on us?

Facebook rebranded to Meta, but this was more of a corporate rebrand to signal the new direction that the company was taking. The platforms it owns still have all the same names. We still say I’m gonna post this on my story.

Google rebranded to alphabet, and this was also just a corporate rebrand. We still say google it.

What about if we go back in history and try to find non tech examples:

Here are a couple famous name changes:

Point is, there have been a lot of name changes throughout history, but there are two issues with most examples of brand name changes.

That being said, there is one example from the 1980s that may give us some insight. One company had a product so famous that it was associated with the category itself and they tried to change that up.

What happened as a result was absolutely wild. It was terrible, or great, depending on how you look at it. Spoiler alert, the company is still alive and well today and has a market cap of 261 billion dollars as writing this article.

Alright I won’t hold you in suspense any longer, you may have already guessed this. I’m talking about Coca Cola and the launch of the new coke formula in 1985.

Its 1985, you’re the CEO of coca cola and you’re still the world’s best selling soft drink, but Pepsi keeps gaining market share. You try to figure out what’s happening and you see one of the marketing campaigns Pepsi is running is the Pepsi challenge.

Basically they would have people take blind taste tests of coke and Pepsi and they found that most people actually prefer the taste of Pepsi.

As CEO of coke you figure they must be manipulating the data and making themselves look better. You tell your team to conduct the same test, but make sure we’re getting a broad sample size.

Turns out, even in your own internal tests, the consumers prefer the taste of Pepsi over coke.

Now the answer is clear to you. There’s only one thing to do. The problem is clearly the taste, we need to change the formula of coke so its better than Pepsi’s, right?

That’s exactly what then CEO Roberto Goizueta did. On April 23, 1985, he announced that coca cola would be introducing a new formula that’s “smoother, rounder, yet bolder - a more harmonious flavor”

I want you to keep in mind that coke was still the best selling soft drink in the world at this point.

Instead of doing an a/b test on the shelves to see how people would respond. They did a complete swap. Coca cola discontinued its 99 year classic recipe and rolled out the new formula.

The CEO at the time said: “Some may choose to call this the boldest single marketing move in the history of the packaged-goods business, We simply call it the surest move ever made.”

Boy was he wrong. Coke stock took a nosedive, while Pepsi’s shot up.

Pepsi gave its employees the day off and took out a full page newspaper ad that said, “after 87 years of going at it eyeball to eyeball, the other guy just blinked.”

By June 1985, Coke was getting 8,000 calls a day from angry customers about the new coke formula. People were actually getting together and holding protests where they would pour bottles of new coke down sewer drains. One person even filed a lawsuit against Coke to force it to provide the classic formula.

Coke had done 190,000 blind taste tests and had all the data to prove this was a good decision, but they didn’t factor in one aspect. Emotion. They didn’t think through the impact of changing something that is so embedded in the routine of so many people all around the world. Coke wasn’t just about the taste, it was about all the memories you made throughout your life while drinking coke. People associated all those emotions and good times with coke, and when they changed coke it was like getting rid of a way to access all those good associations and memories. They took something familiar and completely wiped it out and told you here take this one and start building memories with this version of coke. It doesn’t work like that.

79 days after the announcement of the new coke formula, on July 11, 1984 (free slurpee day), coca cola leaders apologized and brought back the classic formula of coke labeled as coca cola classic. Almost immediately coca cola classic took the top spot as the world’s leading soft drink, and coca cola’s stock price shot back up too. By the end of 1985 coca cola stock price actually realized an increase of 19% compared to before the day of the release of new coke.

People call this one of the greatest marketing blunders of all time. And there’s a lot of lessons here on what to do and what not to do. We could do a whole case study on new coke. But we’re talking about Twitter, or X i mean.

Although X isn’t a soft drink company, it has global brand recognition - like coke had.

Twitter was familiar, I remember in high school if someone would say something really profound, instead of saying wow that was powerful or that was dope, we’d shortform it to retweet or even RT. These terms just became and still are a part of popular culture.

X on the other hand, is completely new to us.

I’m not here to argue that changing twitter to X was a good idea. I think everyone is aligned in that it was crazy to take a brand with so much familiarity with so many people and just wipe it away in one go.

That being said, there is one key difference between X and Coke and that is the reason why this will actually work and it will catch on.

And that is that X is not a public company. Elon musk owns it.

If Elon was the CEO and the company was publicly traded still, I’m sure there would be a lot of pressure from investors to change it back. But since he’s not the CEO and he actually owns the company, he can do what he wants.

Now X catching on will take time.

In our video where we looked at the launch of the new BMW beaver tooth grille we talked about the mere exposure effect where being exposed to a specific thing more and more (particularly for a thing you initially dislike), increases familiarity as well as the likelihood of you ending up liking the thing.

Basically the more you get exposed to something, the more you get used to it. If you’re watching a horror movie and they keep showing the scary monster, by the end you’re not so scared of the monster anymore.

Even in your own life, you may know someone that changed their name. Sure at first it can throw you off, especially if you’re close and you’ve known them for a long time, but over time you get used to it.

The same thing will happen with X.

And there will be huge marketing upside when that happens.

Its clear Elon has much bigger aspirations for X than just text, so what we associate with X in 10 years or 20 years won’t be the same as what we associate with Twitter right now.

Just like coca cola classic, the bronco, the hummer, the supra - bringing back the classic twitter in 10 or 20 years will bring back nostalgic memories of the platform we once used to micro blog our thoughts into the web. And when that happens, it’ll break the internet.