Iconic Brands, Reimagined. But Stupid.

In his latest for NiemanLab, Joshua Benton mulls over the shockingly stupid rebrand of Twitter to X. Just the letter X. That's it.

Apparently, Musk has been obsessed with a company called X for a long time now. And he plans for X to be the name for what he hopes Twitter will evolve into, which is a sort of everything app, like China's WeChat.

But instead of thinking too long or hard about the move, Benton has fun with the thought of "What if other household brands in the media space threw away such longstanding recognition, seemingly unconcerned with the consequences?"

If other media companies thought about brand equity the way Elon Musk thinks about Twitter’s (er, X’s)

In the spirit of Tronc, Elon Musk has decided to throw away more than a decade of brand equity by changing the name of Twitter to...the letter X. Imagine if more media executives followed his lead.

Nieman LabJoshua Benton

The results are a hilarious round-up of nonsensical brand realignment on par with Musk's killing of the iconic blue bird.

What elevates the piece to genius-level is that in addition to satirical examples, like The New York Times rebranding as - (pronounced "hyphen") or CNN revamped as just N (for "News"), Benton includes the real-life example of HBO Max rebranding as simply Max, with verbatim (or close to it) PR-speak that was likely used in the rollout a few months ago. It's just a brilliant piece of writing all around.