What's in a name---or a logo?

Twitter's old logo

Paul Krugman in today's NY Times:

....There’s a long-running debate among economists about why people are willing to pay a premium for name brands. Some emphasize ignorance — one influential study found that health professionals are more likely than the public at large to buy generic painkillers, because they realize that they’re just as effective as name brands....

What’s clear is that brand names that for whatever reason inspire customer loyalty have real value to the company that owns them and shouldn’t be changed casually.

So what the heck does Elon Musk, the owner of TAFKAT — the app formerly known as Twitter — think he’s doing, changing the platform’s name to X, with a new logo many people, myself included, find troubling?

....Google renamed itself Alphabet, presumably to convey to investors its aspiration to be more than a search engine, but the search engine itself is still named Google. 

Philip Morris renamed itself Altria, presumably in part to diminish its perceived association with lung cancer, but its customers still smoke Marlboros.

Changing product names is more problematic, because it risks losing customer loyalty, so it tends to happen only when there’s a real problem with the existing name.

....So what was wrong with Twitter as a brand name? Nothing, as far as I can tell. It was friendly-sounding and a bit funny, and resonated with the role of the platform as a place for people to chatter about a variety of subjects. 

The Twitter logo was also fine — distinctive, instantly recognizable and without any obvious negative connotations.

But Musk has nonetheless ditched all of that in favor of X, a harsh-sounding name with no relationship to what the platform does....

So what was Musk thinking with his renaming of TAFKAT?

Well, everything we know suggests that he basically wasn’t thinking. For some reason he has always had a thing about the letter X — his rocket company is SpaceX and he tried to get PayPal to rename itself X.com, and was ousted as C.E.O. immediately afterward, perhaps because his colleagues thought it sounded like, yes, a porn site. 

And that awful logo didn’t go through the usual design process (Twitter’s bird logo evolved over seven years). It was casually outsourced — he asked his followers to suggest symbols and chose one he liked.

But then, Musk’s sudden change of brand name and symbol, without a clear rationale, fits the pattern of everything else he’s done at TAFKAT.

He clearly suffers from a severe case of Tech Bro Syndrome, that weird combination of hubris and conspiracy theorizing so prevalent in his social set. 

He accused Twitter of censoring conservatives, ignoring the reality that in a MAGA-ridden nation any attempt to limit the spread of dangerous misinformation will hit the right harder than the left. 

He purchased Twitter in the belief that his personal brilliance could easily make the company profitable, no need for hard thinking about business strategy....

See also Elon Musk’s Quixotic Quest to Turn X Into an ‘Everything App’ and Elon Musk and the weird history of Brand X

Rob's comment:

Krugman probably remembers the schoolyard taunt: If you're so smart, why aren't you rich? See the New Yorker profile of Musk's lawyer who's getting rich because he's smart: How Alex Spiro Keeps the Rich and Famous Above the Law.

Old liberals like us might also remember that Costa-Gavras movie with a one-letter title that has a disquieting contemporary resonance.