So far, we’ve looked at the reasons why a brand might choose to undergo a migration to try to uncover why Musk might have acted so drastically and explored best practices for brands during the brand migration process. In the third installment of our Brand Migration series, we reflect on where Musk’s new brand is today, and what its future looks like following the rebrand.
Experts are already making predictions that Twitter will lose $20 billion in brand value and more than 30 million users in the next year following Musk’s takeover. Musk himself has also announced that profit plans are behind due to ad revenue being down 50%, so the rebrand is not looking good…so far.
Musk needs to bring something beneficial and new to users, and fast. So far the changes he’s made to the platform seem bizarre and don’t clearly benefit his audience. For example, adding a limit to tweets viewed per day for free accounts on the premise that this would limit the amount of spam and bot content is not the exciting new hub users were hoping for.
Introducing a subscription model to a previously free platform hasn’t had a positive impact on lifting up the brand either. If they don’t see some kind of transformative manifestation of Musk’s ambition to create a “common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner”, users may be starting looking for their community and entertainment elsewhere, which won’t be difficult…
Emerging and existing competitor brands swiftly saw the benefits of Musk freeing the bird, with Thread’s, Meta’s new social media platform launching at just the right time to collect the fallout from Twitter, gaining over 100 million users in the first 5 days of launching. The stitches may already seem to be unraveling, with Threads not bringing anything differentiating to the table from Twitter, but, without Musk doing some serious damage control, this might be enough of a pull factor to move consumers from X to Threads. Other, less-known, brands are also gaining traction as a result of Twitter’s disruption, with Mastodon gaining a number of users following July’s events.
Only time will tell if this is a brilliant case study for tearing up the [Rebrand] Rulebook leading to long-term success, or if the misalignment between brand, direction, and users’ needs has taken the brand a step too far, far too quickly. We still have a lot of questions, and as brand strategists and enthusiasts we are looking for the bigger play here, but for now, we’d love to know what you think is neXt?