Twitter's Rebrand to X Skipped the First Question in Rebranding

Introduction

Twitter's rebrand to "X" landed with a wave of public confusion and skepticism, and it's a useful case study in exactly what can go wrong when a company changes its name.

Rebranding

Caroline Wiertz, a marketing professor at Bayes Business School, frames the question every rebrand needs to answer before it starts: "Why are we doing this?" That's not a rhetorical nicety — rebranding is genuinely high-risk, and skipping that question is how companies end up spending money to confuse their own customers.

Twitter's case raises the stakes further. Elon Musk's decision to rebrand puts over fifteen years of brand recognition at risk, discarding a name that had become part of everyday language. On top of that, "X" is a single letter already used in countless existing trademarks, which makes it close to impossible to defend legally.

The Ramifications

Beyond the name itself, a rebrand means securing new domain names, social handles, and international trademark rights — each one its own separate headache. That's the real argument for treating a brand as an organization's most valuable asset, one only worth touching for a genuinely compelling reason.

What Other Rebrands Show

Other corporate rebrands show both how this can go right and how it can go wrong. Standard Life Aberdeen's shift to "Abrdn" was mocked initially but earned grudging acceptance thanks to careful execution and clear communication about why the change happened. Facebook's shift to "Meta" reflected a genuine strategic bet on the metaverse — a bet that hasn't yet won over investors.

Dunkin' Donuts shortening to "Dunkin'" is closer to a model case: it kept the brand equity intact while repositioning the company as a modern, on-the-go brand. Royal Mail's brief rebrand to "Consignia" is the opposite lesson — a name nobody understood or wanted, abandoned within a couple of years. Petco's shift to Petco Health and Wellness worked because it reflected an actual strategic shift in what the company offered, not just a new logo.

Radical Renamings

Musk has a track record of unconventional renaming — attempting to rebrand PayPal as X.com years ago, and naming his own child X Æ A-12 — which doesn't exactly inspire confidence going into a corporate rebrand of this scale. Mike Proulx, research director at Forrester, called Twitter's rebrand "an extremely risky move," and Forrester's own polling backs that up: 43% of respondents viewed the name change as a mistake.

YouGov found even sharper pushback among Twitter's own users — 67% expressed dissatisfaction with the change. Functioning effectively as a full app relaunch, the rebrand alienated a meaningful share of both users and advertisers in the process.

Conclusion

Rebranding can genuinely open a new chapter for a company, or it can sever ties with the customers who built its value in the first place — the difference usually comes down to whether "why are we doing this?" got a real answer before the name change, not after. Twitter's shift to X skipped that question in a very public way, and the data on user and analyst reaction reflects it.

Tyrone Showers