Elon Musk is widely considered the visionary businessman of our time, able to predict what consumers will want most in the future.
So why does it seem that he forgot to do something as simple as secure a trademark for his new X Corporation logo before embarking on a wholesale rebranding of Twitter that no one asked for?
Trademarks are a vital component of everyday business protecting yourself from imitators who feed off of the intellectual property of others. Imagine a new smartphone manufacturer advertising its latest device with a stylized “T” logo much like the Tesla badge emblazoned on Musk’s cars — such a company would deliberately try to make money by jumping on his coattails.
Unfortunately for the entrepreneur, the letter X is perhaps one of Musk’s most difficult letters to brand, since there are so many ways to elegantly represent two crossed lines.
“It is possible for multiple companies to own and use one-letter trademarks,” Rachel Dixon, trademark attorney and founder of Catalytic Law, tells WebMD. to publish to the platform. “There are already 984 registrations in the Trademark Registry for marks in which the only letter element is an ‘X’.”
This means that the more unique and distinctive a trademark is, the easier it is to protect it.
Take, for example, the Anglo-Swedish drug group AstraZeneca, which was created out of a 1998 merger. Its logo consists of two letters—just one more than a musk—that represent the first letter of each founding company. But its interlocking design combines the two to resemble the three-dimensional folds of a protein, making it hard to copy without legal exposure.
Xbox Series X logo vs. the new X logo on Twitter. Who did it better? pic.twitter.com/AvFPwfZiRw
– Tom Warren (@tomwarren) July 24, 2023
Moreover, it is not just about whether Musk can adequately protect his IP address against theft, but whether he will accidentally trespass against another company.
“Microsoft owns a trademark for X,” Andres Guadamuz warnedwho teaches intellectual property law at the University of Sussex and is editor-in-chief of the journal World Intellectual Property Journal. “Musk has destroyed a beloved and strong brand, with potential years of litigation and possibly no brand.”
Valuable origin
A brand can be one of the most valuable assets a company can have. In a world of consumer goods where products are often easily substituted for one another — such as laundry detergent or, more recently, beer in the case of Bud Light — the reason some companies retain pricing power is brand loyalty.
Thus, re-branding is a very sensitive issue that usually leads to only evolutionary, sometimes even barely perceptible, changes in corporate identity (CI). That’s because consumers associated with a particular brand don’t react well to wholesale changes and the risk is that management can repel more net customers than they attract.
Tim Calkins, professor of marketing at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, said in a statement sent to luck. “Almost all core branding concepts indicate that this is a misdirected move.”
In light of his controversial leadership on Twitter, Musk has been repeatedly asked if it would make more sense if he had built the envisioned version of WeChat from scratch. Musk has long responded that this was indeed an option he considered, but he felt Twitter would speed up the process.
With the rebrand, Musk confirmed that he spent $44 billion to buy an installed user base of 215 million daily active users that could generate revenue for the company.
Realizing his dream of an app that can be used to buy movie tickets, book a table at a restaurant, or simply upload a video from your vacation could create significant value for his elite group of shareholders, which includes Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Binance’s Changpeng Zhao, and Saudi Prince Waleed bin Talal.
But he may not be able to maintain that value if he fails at something as basic as his brand.
How do you protect a key element of your CI if you choose your logo design not created from scratch by a graphic artist, but pulled from an existing font, as Musk appears to have?
Tom Warren, senior editor at the edge, identify it as Glyph “X” from Alphabet Special 4 developed by Monotype Imaging. It even contains a universal code, or Unicode, that all computers can mathematically process.
Trademark attorney Josh Gerben said Reuters condition.
All of which means that Musk is likely to add to the list of challenges he already faces in fixing a financially unhealthy company that racked up $13 billion in debt before apparently cutting off half of its advertising revenue.
