What’s in a Name?
In a year, people won’t even remember Twitter. Or will they? Lessons for naming a brand from the past.
In Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, they fall in love, only to realize that they are from feuding families who would never approve of their union. Juliet bemoans “‘What's in a name?’ that which we call a rose. By any other name would smell as sweet.” Just as the beauty and aroma of a rose are the same no matter what name one assigns to it, Juliet claims that her name has nothing to do with who she is.
“A year from now, people won’t even remember it was once called Twitter,” said Takafumi Horie, an opinion leader in Japan where Twitter is very popular, on his YouTube channel a few days ago.
Seeing how one influential figure who’s built amazing companies could cause so much damage and harm in front of our eyes is disheartening and concerning. Also, the wreckage of Twitter is just helping the other influential figure and his platforms in unintended ways. While everyone knows the cage match between the two would never happen, we all kind of wish it would.
Tesla, StarLink, and SpaceX are just three of the companies Musk owns, started, and/or manages, and their names are simple, clever, and meaningful. Judging by how recognizable those brands have now become, Musk is one of the most talented brand builders of our generation.
I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt and say that time will only tell whether Musk, Horie, and Juliet are right and whether this move to drop the name of one of the most recognizable brands in the world is a good one.
For one, though, the content and ads I get served on my Twitter feed—or do I need to say X’s I see on my X feed?—are noticeably junkier and increasingly irrelevant. Juliet would have to admit that the rose doesn’t smell as sweet. But at this point, it’s no use piling on and opining about the fate of X.
A few months ago, when people were all up and arms about the change from New York City’s beloved “I ❤️ NY” logo to “We ❤️ NYC,” I wrote about rebranding efforts in the past that I thought provided useful lessons.
Renaming a brand takes the effort to a whole new level. It is one of the trickiest and possibly riskiest exercises in branding. The world of marketing is moving more and more towards science than art, but naming/renaming a brand remains to be more art than science.
Here’s a subjective look at a few wins and fails of renaming efforts from the past.
🏅 Win: Blue Ribbon Sports → Nike
In 1964, Bill Bowerman, a track-and-field coach at the University of Oregon, and his former student Phil Knight founded Blue Ribbon Sports by selling running shoes from the back of a van.
Initially, their business was distributing shoes from Onitsuka (now known as ASICS) in Japan. In 1971, Bowerman and Knight had developed and were ready to distribute their own shoes. It is famously known that Knight commissioned and paid $35 to a Portland State University graphic design student for several logo design options, one of which was the swoosh.
Jeff Johnson, the first employee of Blue Ribbon Sports and as chronicled in a Runner’s World article, had read an in-flight magazine article about the great brand names that become household terms, such as Kleenex and Xerox. They had no more than two syllables and at least one exotic letter or sound in them with a Z, X, or K. The name “Twitter” doesn’t fall into this pattern but “X” does.
The morning of the deadline, Johnson suggested the word Nike, the name of a Greek goddess signifying victory.
Knight didn’t love the name. He preferred the name Dimension Six but no one else on his team did so he begrudgingly gave in. Some records indicate that it was in 1971 that Blue Ribbon Sports became Nike, Inc. when it severed ties with Onitsuka while others say it was in 1978.
Regardless of the timing, Dimension Six wouldn’t have fit well with the swoosh. A simple logo and a name that represented the purpose of the products they were making and selling turned out to be the winning combination. Said easier than done.
Lesson:
As a leader, listening to others around you can pay off huge dividends.
🥈 (Partial) Win: Facebook → Meta
In our recent memory, Facebook pulled the trigger to change the name from Facebook to Meta in the fall of 2021, not too long after the Facebook Files as revealed by Frances Haugen, were published in the Wall Street Journal. I see this case as a peculiar one in that it’s an expensive failure and an unexpected success at the same time.
While the timing of the rebrand made it seem like Facebook was reacting to the WSJ report, it probably wasn’t.
Changing a name is a major effort for a global corporation, especially at Facebook/Meta’s scale. Having been part of various rebranding efforts, I know for a fact that it requires many months, typically six months or more, of careful coordination and alignment. Zuckerberg must have been planning the name change for quite some time to distract the public from controversies and misinformation scandals leading up to the report.
In October 2021, Meta’s Horizon World had 280,000 users. A year later, it actually shrunk to 200,000. For a company that claims more than 77% of Internet users, about 3.59 billion people, calling its metaverse effort a failure sounds like an understatement.
Meta did take a major beating from the Facebook Files. Its stock fell from $378.69 on Sept 10, 2021, a few weeks before the WSJ report, down to $90.79 on Nov 4, 2022. It’s now trading back at $322.71 as of this writing, 3.5x of what it was less than a year ago.
One thing Zuckerberg seems to have a knack for is timing. For one, while the direction of the renaming effort may have been a complete miscalculation, its intention and the timing to divert attention away from its battered image seems to have worked handsomely, as much as I hate to say it.
Another brilliant timing was the recent release of Threads. As Twitter seemed to be fumbling with its repeated disastrous feature changes and releases, Zuckerberg decided to strike with a launch of what seemed like an incomplete but adequate product. Again, an opportunistic timing.
Lessons:
Timing matters. Hugely.
“What’s in a name?” in practice. Sometimes, how it sounds matters more than what it means.
☠️ Fail: Datsun → Nissan
This is a famous case of mismanaging a brand and it ended up costing the company an enormous amount of cost as well as loss.
The name Datsun may be familiar to those of us with experience in the automotive industry and/or old enough to remember the 1980s.
First mass-produced in 1931 in Japan, Datsun was initially the name of a compact car DAT Automotive manufactured. By the 1960s and 70s, it had become a “global favorite,” especially in America. By then, it was a well-known lineup of cars and trucks and consistently one of two top-selling Japanese brands in the U.S., the other being Toyota. Nissan Motor, established in 1933, was a reorganized version of the company called DAT Automobile that manufactured and sold Datsun.
In 1981, the company resolved to rebrand all Datsuns as Nissans, in the name of the global strategy to strengthen the company name. “The absence of the Nissan name in the U.S. rankled Nissan executives who had seen Toyota and Honda become household words," according to David Aaker, the author of Managing Brand Equity.
In other words, it was jealousy and ego of executives at Nissan.
This is an aspect of branding that often gets overlooked. Naming and renaming a brand can be a highly subjective and oftentimes emotional process. It gets especially personal when founders and/or owners are involved.
Lesson:
When the ego takes over, it could have disastrous consequences. We might be witnessing one such instance as we speak.
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