Goals PR

The riveting drama that is Twitter Inc X communicated continues.

In this week’s episode, Elon Musk released the much-awaited ‘Death of a Bird: featuring X rebrand’.

Here are 5 valuable lessons any founder or CEO can learn from Elon Musk’s Twitter to X rebrand:

1. Do Your Due Diligence:
Always check and secure the intellectual property of the brand identity you are rebranding to.

As it turns out, Microsoft (courtesy of Xbox), Meta, and hundreds others hold intellectual property rights to various 'X' trademarks

This makes the X rebrand a legal suit landmine that Elon cannot musk over

2. Ensure A Smooth Transition of Digital Assets
Make sure, beforehand, that you can uncontroversially acquire the social media accounts and domain names your new brand identity needs.

TechCrunch reported that the ‘X’ Twitter handle was repossessed without warning or financially compensating the former owner, Gene X Hwang

3. Educate Your stakeholders
You may acquire the company but stakeholders always retain ownership of the brand

Instead of a shock therapy, Twitter should have educated users, advertisers, and other stakeholders on the planned rebrand.

That is how Meta and Alphabet succeeded in keeping users, advertisers, and investors happy after rebranding.

4. Consider User Behavior
A simple study of Twitter’s lingo reveals the impact the X rebrand can have on user behavior.

Now, Twitter users used to say, “I Tweeted” or “Read my Tweet”.

What will they now say under X, “We Hexed” or “Read my Hex?”

It is not a good thing to ‘hex’ someone or be ‘hexed’, if you know what I mean...

5. Don’t Rush It
Successful rebrands take TIME!

So, plan…plan..plan: don't spring it as a surprise on people.

First, it was the mad rush to replace the sweet blue bird with a dog; that didn’t go down well with Twitter users

Now, it’s the X cutting through the beloved little bird.

To say that the rebrand is undoing years of branding behind Twitter’s blue bird is an understatement.

The rebrand would have been smoother but Elon Musk dislikes my kind: PR Experts.

Now he has manufactured a brand reputation crisis whose price tag could quickly rise to 44 billion dollars guaranteed by Tesla stock.

But you can avoid these pitfalls using the 5-step checklist:
1. Do Your Due Diligence:
2. Ensure A Smooth Transition of Digital Assets
3. Educate Your Stakeholders
4. Consider Stakeholder User Behavior
5. Don’t Rush it

Between January 2020 and October 2022, Kenya accounted for a meager 9 of the 100 exits made by investors in African startups.

Interestingly, in the same period, 76% of venture capitalists desiring to invest in Kenyan and African startups identified ‘the lack of viable exit options’ as their primary obstacle.

Now, Venture Capitalists (VCs) get a return on their investment back through mergers & acquisitions (M&A) or an IPO listing in the Securities Exchange: they call these exits.

As competition for shrinking venture capital funds grows in the 2023 VC funding winter, I see VCs preferring to invest in founders with realistic 6–7-year exit strategies.

From our interactions with entrepreneurs, we understand that taking a company public is the desired exit strategy that most founders dream of.

However, since 2015, African security exchanges have seen a historically low number of initial public offerings (IPOs) and a high rate of delisting.

Furthermore, of the 33 reported African investor exits in 2021, none executed it through an IPO. While in 2019, only one out of the 44 exits by investors in Africa went the IPO route and it was not in Kenya! In 2022, there were no IPOs.

This grim IPO reality makes M&A the optimal exit scenario for VC-funded businesses in Africa and Kenya where numbers are more promising.

What do the African M&A numbers tell us?

In 2022, 48% of the 82 investor exits were reported to be from strategic trade buyouts, with the remaining 52% being shared by financial buyers and management buyouts (MBOs).

As any successful startup founder will tell you, publicity is one of the main tools that will help you build the credibility needed to successfully get the attention of prospective M&A exit partners.

If the M&A exit partners don’t know how good a fit you will be to their company or Private Equity portfolio, a merger or acquisition is unlikely to happen.

Good publicity is also a key recipe for a successful public listing through an IPO if that’s your optimal exit scenario.