I have (well-managed) arthritis and take pain reducers every
day. I normally buy generic acetaminophen; but many people still buy brand-name
Tylenol, even though it costs much more.
اضافة اعلان
The
Economics of Brand Loyalty: Understanding Consumer BehaviorThere’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. Others suggest that there may be a rational
calculation involved: The quality of name brands may be more reliable because
the owners of these brands have a reputation to preserve. It doesn’t have to be
either-or; the story behind the brand premium may depend on the product.
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.
A brand name is not just a label, it is the embodiment of customer trust, product consistency, and corporate reputation - to alter it is to tamper with the very essence of the business.
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?
It’s important to distinguish between corporate rebranding —
changing the official name of a company — and changing the names of the
company’s products. 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.
The
Economics of Brand Loyalty: Understanding Consumer BehaviorChanging 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. It was definitely a good idea to change the name of
Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda to 7UP. It’s actually remarkable that it
took PepsiCo so long to realize that in an America that has changed (for the
better), the Aunt Jemima brand name had to go. But absent such good reasons,
sensible businesses keep the brand names their customers keep buying.
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.
Furthermore, the new logo — a slightly embellished version
of the letter X — is problematic in several ways. It probably can’t be
trademarked, because it’s more or less indistinguishable from a lowercase x in
an existing font. Many TAFKAT users say that they’re embarrassed by the logo,
which makes them feel as if they’re visiting a porn site. My reaction was a bit
different. To me, and I’m sure others, the new logo has the vibes of an
authoritarian political symbol, like the Z emblem of Russians invading Ukraine
— or some other historical symbols I’m sure you can think of.
Brand decisions without strategic foresight are like sailing
without a compass; you may end up somewhere, but likely not where you intended.
Modern corporations normally give a lot of thought to choosing
brand names and logos. So what was Musk thinking with his renaming of TAFKAT?
It’s really hard to see any business rationale for junking a perfectly good
brand identity and replacing it with a name and logo almost everyone finds
off-putting.
Musk's Erratic Branding Strategies: The Risk of Renaming Twitter
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 CEO 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.
And he’s been flailing wildly ever since.
Will the Xification of Twitter finally be a flail too far? Social
networks tend to be especially durable because — like international currencies
— they benefit from self-reinforcement: People use them because other people
use them. It will take many bad decisions to push TAFKAT to the tipping point
where people abandon it for another platform.
But Musk is working on it.
Read more Opinion and Analysis
Jordan News
.jpg)
.jpg)
