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Our marketing columnist stayed up late in Tasmania and put his headset on for the Facebook Connect VR conference. But he came away unimpressed with the branding revelations that followed.
By now you probably know about the biggest branding move of 2021 and possibly the last few years. Facebook will become Meta, a new company that will encompass all the various existing social media apps from the company formerly known as Facebook and all the future projects that it will subsequently develop.
I must confess that I did not feel very ‘meta’ sitting in my underpants for 80 minutes watching Zuckerberg and his coterie of senior developers looking suitably future-struck, while wandering around various rendered backdrops. It was very boring. I lost count of the perky, 30-something people who popped up for a casual, completely scripted, chat with “Zuck” about the potential of the metaverse. And I had to sit through 76 minutes of this flaccid future porn before we reached the reason I was there; the announcement of a new brand for Facebook.
A lot of people will bang on today about ‘rebranding’ and its various perils. But they are largely missing the point. Yes, Facebook the company is changing its name to Meta – but only at the corporate level. You will remember that, less than two years ago, Facebook became the corporate brand for its suite of social media apps that includes Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook (the product brand). Well now Zuckerberg is changing that corporate brand name to Meta and adding a swanky blue infinity loop logo to boot.
While the name is somewhat significant, the real news is in the brand architecture implications for Facebook – sorry, Meta – going forward. Facebook now becomes simply one of the many brands within a company called Meta that is now firmly focused on what Zuckerberg called “the next chapter”. Meta is a proper house of brands with a large, and one might expect growing, suite of disconnected brands within it.
As usual with brand architecture moves like this, what appears relatively cosmetic actually reveals much more of the strategic direction of a company. The move to Meta reflects two very different interpretations of the Greek word, which means ‘beyond’. Zuckerberg’s new brand strategy is designed to take his company beyond the current reputational challenges that it now faces. And it is also designed to set up the company for the future digital environments that will exist beyond the current context of app-based software.
Beyond the current problems
Meta helps with the first challenge of going beyond the existing troubles by providing much-needed perceptual distance between Facebook and its sister brands, and the holding company that owns them all. With its dodgy brand image and recurring reputational missteps, the decision to name the whole company Facebook was stupid back in 2019. And it has not got any smarter since then.
Corporate brands are important on any number of levels, from supplier relationships to employer branding. And all of these levels will have been impacted by Facebook’s disastrous errors over the past few years. It was almost impossible not to watch yesterday’s announcement, and the cavalcade of perky executives that appeared in it, without imagining these people having to go to a dinner party in the Valley and tell people that they worked for Facebook – then crying outside with a glass of chardonnay in their hand at the reaction.
More generally, the heat on Facebook is set to worsen. But if that heat focuses on only one brand of many within the Meta company, Zuckerberg will hope that the rest of his empire will be cut a little bit more slack. He may even have plans to appoint someone to run Facebook and handle this heat, while he heads up to the green, un-shat-upon fields of Meta. That would be a mistake, but it would not stop him making it.
Meta will also take some of the pressure off the higher-potential brands, like Instagram, that were done very few favours when they were squeezed closer to Facebook in both platform and branding senses back in 2019. Zuckerberg noted yesterday that users will no longer need to access most of the company’s services using their Facebook ID and password, suggesting that the future is about distance, not proximity, from the founding brand of the group.
Beyond the current world
The other rationale for Meta is…
