BirdCopied

MessageBird, the Amsterdam cloud communications company founded in 2011, announced on 1 February 2024 that it was now simply Bird. Reuters reported that the privately held firm was cutting prices to well below those of its US rival Twilio in a bid to win market share, and quoted chief executive Robert Vis saying in a blog post on the new bird.com domain that the company was taking its margins to zero.

The name was only half the news. In its own announcement the company said its pricing was changing too, and that it was launching Bird CRM, a product for marketing, sales and payments across email, SMS and WhatsApp at a 40 to 90 per cent discount. TechCrunch reported a 90 per cent cut on SMS and a marketing campaign quoting Jeff Bezos: your margins are my opportunity. Vis argued that plain channel access had become a commodity and that the next decade belongs to what customers can do with a channel, not access to it.

TechCrunch also noted that the company had reportedly bought the bird.com domain a couple of years earlier, allegedly for many millions, and raised the obvious confusion with Bird, the rental scooter business that had recently gone bankrupt. Vis said the decision was made well before that bankruptcy and that he was building a company meant to last 50 years, adding that he never expected the scooter firm to last that long. The company's legal notice described the change as a branding change that did not affect the contracting entity.

Dropping Message from the name is the logical end of the strategy. A company that wants to give away messaging and sell software on top cannot keep a name that describes the commodity. Bird is short, memorable and expensive, the kind of asset a founder buys when he wants the brand to outlive the product line. The cost is distinctiveness: a single common word is hard to search and, as TechCrunch's opening line showed, already associated with someone else. The rename only pays off if the CRM gives the word a meaning of its own, and that is a product question, not a design one.