Branding

Going to Blazes

Ex-Twitter’s new tagline is a flaming disaster. Maybe that’s not an accident.

Dumpster-fire photo by Arny Mogensen on Unsplash

Whenever I come across a bit of branding language that strikes me as odd or wrongheaded, I make an effort to look at it from the brand’s perspective instead of from my own. Sure, I’ve been paid to create distinctive names and taglines for my clients for some 25 years, but I still have my blind spots. We all do.

So when on July 30 the company once known as Twitter and now called X revealed its peculiar new tagline, I paused for a few seconds to give it fair consideration.

“Blaze Your Glory!” replaces “Let’s Talk” on the Aoo Store.

OK, consider it considered.

“Blaze your glory!” is a bad, weird, unnatural tagline.

It sounds as though it was created by artificial intelligence, or by a person who’d never spoken or read English.

Or by a CEO with a grandeur complex.

I wasn’t the only one cringing.

The headline on Motherboard’s story called the tagline “bizarre.” The journalist Josh Marshall tweeted: “Is this written by someone who struggles with words?” Yahoo Finance…