Is Elon Nuts? – How To Flush Billions In Equity

Transcript:

Welcome to the B2B Marketing Mindset, where every Thursday at 11 o’clock here on LinkedIn, we help small businesses get bigger, and medium sized businesses get bigger. I’m Pete Monfre, and today, my co host, Bill Lowell is on vacation. Word has it, he’s luxuriating in Mukwonago, Wisconsin in a large vat of cheese, so we’ll have to ask him about that next time. You know, there’s a lot of opinions out there (And you know what they say about opinions right?) about our buddy, Elon Musk, abruptly changing the name of Twitter, one of the most recognized brands in the world, to an unintelligible symbol. Prince is probably rolling over in his grave based on how well that worked out for him, right? But, the thing I’m not seeing much discussion about is the negative impact of the seemingly impulsive move, on the multibillion dollar loss in brand equity. I have seen a couple of articles about it, but by and large, it seems to be ignored by the media. I think it’s actually the biggest part of the story, and it’s also a lesson in why you don’t do stuff like this. 

 But let me give a disclaimer really quickly. Elon has a lot more money than I. He’s got a company that routinely travels to space, he founded Tesla before it was cool to be electric. And like 99.9999% of people who criticize Mr. Musk, I’d have no business standing in the same room as this guy in terms of vision. So I’m gonna give him the benefit of the doubt, but I just can’t understand this move. 

 Let’s talk about the value of the brand. We’ll do some amateur psychoanalysis of the brilliant, billionaire stoner we all know and love. Is this the end of Twitter: the company, or just the brand? Is a tweet now called an