Is Elon Musk right to ditch the Twitter bird logo design?

One of the most recognisable logo designs online, the tweeting blue bird, disappears. Will the black and white X changing it show to be a masterstroke or a branding catastrophe?

When Jean-Pierre Dube saw the news that billionaire Elon Musk was ditching Twitter’s logo design in favour of an Art Deco-design X, the marketing teacher believed it was a joke.

“Why take an identified brand name, with a great deal of brand name capital around it and after that totally toss it away and go back to square one?” said Prof Dube, who teaches at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. “In the short-term, it appears odd.”

But in the long term, could it work?

Mr Musk’s takeover of Twitter in 2015 has actually been penalizing for the social networks platform.

Advertising profits has actually come by half, Mr Musk said this month, as huge brand names drew back, cautious of modifications he has actually made, consisting of how the company deals with validated accounts and moderates material. Abrupt layoffs and unsettled expenses have actually likewise resulted in criticism and claims.

Estimates by Fidelity, which has a stake in the business, recommend it is now worth simply a 3rd of the $44bn ($34.3bn) that Mr Musk spent for Twitter in October.

Consultancy Brand Finance recently estimated that the company’s brand name deserved $3.9bn, down 32% considering that in 2015 – a fall it credited to Mr Musk’s “aggressive business methods”.

Research recommends that rebrands can settle – especially if a company remains in difficulty or wishes to alter instructions, said Yanhui Zhao, a teacher of marketing at the University of Nebraska Omaha.

His evaluation of 215 rebranding statements by openly noted business discovered that majority of those businesses saw positive returns after they rebranded.

That indicates Mr Musk’s relocations might be prompt, he said, keeping in mind the multi-billionaire’s aspiration to change Twitter into an “whatever app” comparable to China’s WeChat, a social messaging service on which users can send out money, hail taxis, book hotels and play video games, to name a few functions.

“This is a much required rebranding due to the fact that of the tactical re-direction of Twitter,” he informed the BBC.

But success ends up being less most likely when a business remains in chaos, cautioned Shuba Srinivasan, marketing teacher at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. She said it was a specifically dangerous relocation, offered all the social networks rivals, such as Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads, hurrying to fill Twitter’s function.

“The rebranding is most likely to verify the worry of numerous Twitter users that the acquisition by Musk signified completion of the Twitter they understood,” she said.

Nor is it clear that a rebranding addresses Twitter’s issues – a number of which stem in part from Mr Musk, Prof Dube said.

“I didn’t believe there was a brand name issue and brand name identity issue as much as a management issue,” he said.

In a May interview with satire website, The Babylon Bee, Mr Musk previewed the modification, stating he believed he required to “widen the branding for Twitter” to help him be successful at pressing the business beyond the brief text posts that made it popular.

But some experts said that the capacity of this vision achieving success faces long shots.

In June, advisory company Forrester Research released a report called “The very app window has actually closed,” which argued that tech giants such as Google and Apple presently use very app-like functions to billions of users in the United States and Europe, while difficult regulative difficulties and strong competitors limitations opportunities for others.

It kept in mind that WeChat, the example that has actually been pointed out by Mr Musk, ended up being dominant in China early, prior to other payment services emerged – and in part as an outcome of technical concerns, such as restricted phone memory, which dissuaded downloading several apps.

“While Musk’s vision is to turn X into an ‘whatever app,’ this requires time, money, and individuals – 3 things that the business no longer has,” Mike Proulx, a research study director at Forrester, composed after Mr Musk’s statement, including that he believed the company would shut or be be purchased out in the next 12 months.

Even if Twitter’s core users in media, politics and financing remain devoted, as they have in the past, making X effective would need involvement from a far more comprehensive user base – no little obstacle, said Harvard Business School teacher Andy Wu.

But Twitter dealt with problems prior to Mr Musk’s takeover and would gain from some risk-taking, he included.

“We can dispute whether those modifications remain in the ideal instructions, however Twitter does require modifications.”