Ex-girlfriends, ex-boyfriends, ex-wives, ex-husbands, ex-bosses etc.
Doesn’t exactly put “X” in a positive light, does it?
I say call it a Musk. As in “Elon dropped a Musk the other day.”
If you think brand consultants get rich off rebrands, then you don’t know any brand consultants.
But anyway, name changes are pretty much always a stupid idea, unless the original brand has become so toxic that they are dead in the water (Ratners), or the company needs to restructure as the brand name needs to serve a different purpose (Facebook > Meta). Logo changes, on the other hand, happen often, and much less controversially (see GAP, Microsoft). Although generally incrementally is best.
I will continue tweeting until Elon Musk rips my phone out of my cold dead hands.
Maybe there could be a whole other thread about disastrous brand name changes:
In 2001 Royal Mail announced it would be rebranding as “Consignia” at a cost of £1.5m A little over a year later Royal Mail saw sense and reverted back to the original name and branding spending another £1m in the process.
Facebook is still Facebook. The parent company is now called Meta, but the product people use remains Facebook; in any sense that really matters that brand didn’t change.
That’s a decent example. I don’t know if it HELPED them but it didn’t harm them.
That was sort of the opposite of the Meta - Facebook thing. The company had always been Nissan, but invented the “Datsun” brand name for the export market. Eventually they just decided they were better off with one brand name.
We had a unique case here in Ontario. Beer sales are highly regulated, and for decades, the only place to buy beer was Brewer’s Retail, a company owned by the big beer brewing companies. Of course, everyone just called it the beer store, and there was literally no way that could confuse anyone, since in most of the province, it was literally the only store that sold beer.
About 20 years ago, the rules on selling beer were relaxed somewhat, and Brewer’s Retail decided to officially re-brand as The Beer Store. It worked though, because they were just formalizing the practice that was pretty much universal.
ValuJet → AirTran after the infamous Everglades crash. Although in that case ValuJet actually bought another airline and took their name. I doubt most of AirTran’s customers had any idea they were flying on the airline formerly known as ValuJet.
Yet visitors to Canada are always confused when we tell them to go buy something at Canadian Tire…
Reminds me of a bit of advice my friend’s father gave him when he was talking about getting his own place to live, and what he’d need to set up a living space. “If you can’t buy it at Canadian Tire, you don’t need it.”
His father was an immigrant, of course.
How about rubbish? I never saw the point of Twitter from the outset… 128 characters?? Though they rapidly jailbreaked that by allowing references.
A stupid idea then, a stupid idea now.
I must say, this thread was quite amusing when the post previous to mine was the latest. (And I just broke it! Oh well.)
Fewer than one in five Ontarians know Brewers Retail (that’s still the corporation that runs the stores) isn’t a government outfit.
The artist formerly known as Prince is different. He did it because of contractual issues. Plus it’s Prince.
Instead of calling it a tweet you have to sing this song.
Perhaps we could just start referring to the Social Media Formerly Known As Twitter by a smell.
I think Arthur Andersen rebranded itself mostly successfully to Accenture after being caught in a big scandal (I want to say it was something related to the California energy crisis, but I’m not really sure).
You nailed it IMO.
We all should start referring to anything posted on X as a queef. Soon enough nobody will be willing to post there when all their efforts are labeled queefs.
Then X will die, Elmo will be out $44B, and our wirk will be done here.
For decades, if you want to close a window, you click on the “X” in the top right corner.
.
News websites have this really annoying Dept of Redundancy Dept habit of telling you what someone stated in a tweet & then embedding the tweet below that, except now, instead of a blue bird coming up, you see an x in the top right corner as you scroll down the page. Immediately, I think, that’s an ad that can be closed by clicking on the x. Of all the letter & placement combos he could have chosen, X has to be the worst!
The petroleum company Exxon:
ExxonMobil traces its roots to Vacuum Oil Company, founded in 1866. Vacuum Oil later was acquired by Standard Oil in 1879, divested from Standard in 1911 with its breakup, and merged by the Standard Oil Company of New York (Socony), later known as Mobil, in 1931. After the 1911 breakup, Standard Oil continued to exist through its New Jersey subsidiary, sometimes shortened to Jersey Standard, and retained the Standard Oil name in much of the eastern United States. Jersey Standard grew by acquiring Humble Oil in the 1930s and became the dominant oil company on the world stage. The company’s lack of ownership over the Standard Oil name across the United States, however, prompted a name change to unify all of its brands under one name, choosing to name itself Exxon in 1972 over continuing to use three distinct brands of Esso, Enco, and Humble.[21][9]