Twitter to X and five other controversial rebrands from history

Twitter’s blue bird is soon to be no more as owner Elon Musk this week announced the company’s logo is to be a black X.

Rebranding the website that was founded in 2006 has already begun in earnest, with Musk suggesting he plans to turn Twitter “from a social media platform into an everything app”, said NPR.

However, the decision has been widely ridiculed. The change is “pointless” and “sordid-sounding”, said Forbes, who criticised Musk for “setting something on fire he paid $44 billion for”.

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The billionaire owner may also risk “more damage to Twitter’s business”, CNBC added, with the brand already “increasingly vulnerable to competition”.

Twitter’s rebrand is not the first to have disappointed consumers. Here, The Week takes a look at some of the most controversial in history.

Royal Mail

A 2001 decision to rebrand Royal Mail as Consignia was “costly and much-mocked”, said the Financial Times.

The group initially claimed the Consignia name would describe “the full scope of what the Post Office does in the way that the words ‘post’ and ‘office’ cannot”.

However, “one of the most derided names in recent corporate history” ultimately ended up being “consigned to the scrapheap” just over a year later, The Guardian reported.

The subsequent name change to Royal Mail Group was estimated to cost “about £1 million compared with the £1.5 million spent on the Consignia launch”, the newspaper added.

Ukip

The right-wing political party “swiftly reverted” a decision to change its logo to that of a lion’s head in 2017, the Evening Standard reported, after receiving backlash from the Premier League, which stated its lion symbol was “very similar”.

Initially, a Ukip spokesperson told The Sun the lion was “broadly recognised as a symbol of Britain” and denied any breach of copyright.

Paul Oakden, the former party chairman, told the BBC’s “Daily Politics” programme the lion logo was “forward-facing, it is proud, it is determined”, and said he was “not worried” about potential legal action, as the party “did our due diligence”.

Gerard Batten, who took over as the party’s leader in 2018, decided to scrap the lion logo. The decision was not “mourned in Ukip circles”, The Telegraph said, as one source told the newspaper: “Aslan is dead”.

BP

At the turn of the millennium, oil giant British Petroleum changed its name to BP and rebranded itself as ‘beyond petroleum’. The decision was combined with a new logo featuring a sunburst described as a Helios mark, after the Greek sun god. This logo is still in use by the organisation.

However, activists accused the firm of greenwashing, a process where an organisation spends more time and money marketing itself as environmentally friendly than it does on actually minimising its environmental impacts. The brand was ultimately forced to back down.

Writing for The Guardian, Fred Pearce slammed the decision, stating “no amount of clever advertising can hide the fact that its billions of pounds of profit and investment is still all about fossil fuels”.

HBO Max

The 2023 decision by Warner Bros. to rebrand HBO Max as simply Max “baffled” TV insiders, said the Daily Dot, with many viewing the move to drop the well-known HBO as an “inexplicable act of self-sabotage”.

It was described as the “rebrand blunder of the year” by Fast Company, who also critiqued the brand’s “almost too-ridiculous-to-believe tagline” of “the one to watch”.

Warner Bros. executives outlined several reasons for the decision, but the idea of making the brand more “family friendly” was seen as a key driver.

At the brand’s launch event, head of streaming J.B. Perrette told the audience: “HBO is not exactly where parents would most eagerly drop off their kids.”

TGI Fridays

The rambunctious American restaurant chain was born in 1965, with the original founder suggesting the name meant “Thank God it’s Friday”.

However, after 55 years of successful branding, in 2020 the restaurant decided to make a major change. TGI was dropped from the logo, which simply read “Fridays”. The famous red and white colours in the logo were also abandoned in favour of plain black font.

The shift “didn’t go down well”, said National World, and ultimately “didn’t last long” as the brand reverted to its original name this year.