December 5, 2023

The spirit of “New Coke” apparently lives on.

Your brand represents more than your name or logo. A brand attains value over time (and exposure and positioning) by becoming a well known and trusted institution, product, or service that its audience acknowledges as such. When you blithely change the name of your brand, for whatever reason, you do irreparable harm by saying, essentially, “Forget the old me.” Whatever brand equity you’ve built now becomes suspect. This, of course, is probably not your intention — you may think you’re proudly declaring “This is the new, improved me!” But audiences in the marketplace tend to be skeptical and far more likely to wonder “What’s gone wrong with this operation?”

Colloquially, does anyone really refer to Twitter as “X”? Do people tweet or do they “X”? Ye (who admittedly has an array of issues) has reportedly seen his net worth drop from $1.9B to $400M. Not exactly tragic, but not great.

UPDATE 1/5/24:

According to Fidelity Investments (and Elon Musk), X, formerly known as Twitter, has lost 72% of its market value since Musk purchased it.