Love it or hate it, Elon Musk’s edict to X Twitter has certainly gained a lot of attention—and every day, Musk finds a new way to ride the wave, usually by saying or doing something else incendiary. It’s definitely a brand revolution, not evolution.
In a recent Transform magazine article Claire Huxley, strategy director at Design Bridge and Partners, examines how this strategy can be very successful. She writes, “Musk has decided to go full revolution. And he’s not the only tech mogul to make this choice in recent years: when Mark Zuckerberg rebranded the Facebook Company to Meta in 2018, he signaled a decisive shift away from the history of the Facebook app, and communicated the business’s bet on the metaverse as the future of the internet. While much critiqued at the time, Zuckerberg stood firm with the rebrand, doubling down on its usage in communications, PR and across the Meta ecosystem of apps. Five years later, Meta now commands significant brand awareness, and significantly outranks the Facebook app for attributes such as ‘innovative,’ ‘visionary’ and ‘progressive,’ demonstrating the extent to which a well-embedded rebrand can shift perceptions.”