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Hello, and welcome to this month’s Reputation Digest, where Fire on the Hill takes a look at the brands, personalities and more on the way up – and down. This month Elon Musk irks his liberal followers, Pretty Little Things changes tack, and Heathrow suffers a reputational meltdown
Elon Musk’s fall from grace
Elon Musk’s X platform experienced significant outages earlier this month, with more than 41,000 users reporting problems accessing the site during a four-hour period. Musk himself attributed the outages to a “massive” cyberattack from an IP address originating in Ukraine.
However, the U.S. President-adjacent entrepreneur does have a history of claiming technical issues with X were caused by cyberattacks. Perhaps the most notable incident was in August last year when a planned audio livestream with Donald Trump was delayed by 40 minutes. Musk claimed this was the effect of a distributed denial of service attack, in which many devices send meaningless data at once to overwhelm a service.
Senior engineers at X, however, later came out and said there was no evidence of such an attack.
This outage comes at a time when many users are already moving away from the platform. Our recent research found journalists are increasingly moving away from X and looking for alternatives to the microblogging platform. We identified Bluesky as the most popular alternative to X, with a quarter of journalists holding an account. Moreover, three-quarters of Bluesky users posted within one month of the research, compared with only 36 per cent of X users.
Overall, it’s been a difficult month for Elon Musk, with Tesla shares falling by 25 per cent, erasing its gains since Trump’s November 2024 election and falling behind its major Chinese rival, BYD. His approval ratings are also at an all-time low according to a poll from Quinnipiac University, which suggests that 60 per cent of voters disapprove of Musk’s dealings with federal employees.
Yet, all might not be lost, with the Guardian reporting X has returned to its previous $44 billion valuation – the price Musk originally paid. So, perhaps a light at the end of the tunnel.
Pretty Little Thing announces a major rebrand
This month, heads have been turned towards the fashion industry as online fast-fashion retailer Pretty Little Thing announced a major rebrand. Known for its bright pink visuals and ‘Love Island’ style clubbing attire, the brand has been a go-to for its audience of 16-24-year-olds. However, with reports that Gen-Z are drinking less and spending more of their evenings in bed instead of out on the town, the company transitioned from a pre-tax profit of £22 million in the previous year to a pre-tax loss of £6.5 million for the year ending February, 2024.
With a fresh logo, updated website, and new clothes on display, Pretty Little Thing has now launched into a self-labelled ‘new era’ as they ditch the bubble-gum pink for brown, beige and… more brown. This new look is an attempt to emulate a trend of quiet luxury (high-quality, timeless designs that one could imagine being worn by a wealthy socialite) that has swept across social media.
However, news outlets and consumers alike were quick to point out that neither the quality of the clothes nor the brand’s overall ethos have changed – two areas which have been the subject of critique in the past. For example, in 2020, an undercover Sunday Times report claimed that workers in a Leicester factory with links to PLT’s parent company Boohoo were being paid £3.50 an hour. One commenter on the brand’s TikTok said: “The way they’re trying to market themselves as high end with their 90 per cent polyester is criminal.”
The lesson here is that reputation goes deeper than surface-level. Brands that truly want to pivot need to look at all aspects of their business, from product to operations, to marketing. Instead of successfully appealing to a new audience, Pretty Little Thing has exposed a lack of authenticity and a willingness to chase the latest trend.
Heathrow’s reputation in flames
More than 1,300 flights were cancelled after one of the three substations that supply Heathrow Airport with power caught fire on the March 21. More than 200,000 passengers had journeys disrupted, and the event will potentially cost airlines millions of pounds.
The airport reopened after 18 hours but the blame game has continued – even as usual operations have restarted. Counterterrorism police initially led the investigation into the fire, with the suspicion that Russia may be involved. However, authorities have since said that they believe the fire to be accidental – though the final results of the investigation won’t be released for another six weeks.
Heathrow’s decision to shut the airport down completely has also received criticism. John Pettigrew, Chief Executive of energy-supply network National Grid, told the Financial Times that “each substation individually can provide enough power to Heathrow” for the airport to stay open. IATA, the International Air Transport Association, released a comment condemning Heathrow over their lack of resilience, claiming that “this is yet another case of Heathrow letting down both travellers and airlines”.
In even worse news for the airport, a body representing more than 90 airlines that regularly use Heathrow has threatened to take legal action if a settlement over the costs they incurred from Friday’s day-long closure is not reached. It’s clear that Heathrow’s reputation has received a heavy blow – and we’re yet to see how their team will pick up the pieces.
