The Most famous Social Media Platform, Facebook, is planning to rebrand itself. According to The Verge, US technology news website, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s Founder and CEO, plans to discuss the name change at a business event next week, but it might be announced sooner. Its focus on building the metaverse, Facebook is back in its former fast-paced mode here.
Why Should Facebook Rebrand?
According to reports, the company has been actively considering the move for at least two months. The company’s previous chief marketing officer, Antonio Lucio, urged for Facebook to start distancing the corporate brand from its apps three years ago, altering the corporate name to something like “FB Inc.” or an all-caps “FACEBOOK Corporation.”
There are two primary reasons behind Facebook’s shift in approach.
The Initial Reason of Facebook Rebranding
One is that Facebook’s reputation began to deteriorate significantly following the 2016 election and has never fully recovered. The Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal; the FTC investigation; the Congressional antitrust investigation; a parade of departing employees denouncing the company on their way out, culminating in Frances Haugen’s whistleblowing; left-wing activism against hate speech and misinformation on the platform; right-wing activism against censorship and de-platforming.
Although Facebook’s business has continued to expand, it now has fewer political allies than ever. Even more concerning for Facebook is growing indications that a younger generation considers its products less critical than their parents. At the very least, it does not appear to be cool among today’s youth.
Next week will be a whirlwind of Facebook news, the majority of which will degrade the brand’s equity even further. Hundreds of journalists, according to Facebook, want to disclose the findings of their investigations into the company. Haugen will testify once more.
Announcing that Facebook is now part of “Horizon Inc.,” or some equally blank canvas of a term may seem like a poor answer in the middle of all of this. At the very least, it indicates that a page is turning.
The Second Reason of Facebook Rebranding
The second reason the leadership changed its mind about the name is that Facebook the app is not the future of Facebook, the company. It arguably hasn’t been since Zuckerberg purchased Instagram and saw millennials abandon the News Feed favoring a younger, hipper brand.
Recently, the stealthy pace of Oculus and the company’s hardware division has indicated that Facebook the product and Facebook Inc. are becoming more different entities. Even if (say) Hillary Clinton had won in 2016, Cambridge Analytica had never occurred, and its former employees spoke positively of the company.
Congress was not attempting to break it up. Facebook would arguably still have good reason to consolidate its products under some new umbrella corporation. (Unless it’s the Umbrella Corporation.)
The latter is almost certainly the reason we will hear whenever the corporation is willing to discuss it. However, the former is all that everyone wishes to discuss nowadays. From the minute the news broke, Twitter’s dunk machine went into overdrive, with (about) 14 million individuals simultaneously contributing the same dozen or so jokes and suggestions for the new name.
A Metaverse Company
Facebook creates Horizon Worlds, a social virtual reality platform, and Horizon Workrooms, a virtual reality meeting service. Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, has stated that he now holds Monday morning meetings in the metaverse using a virtual table and whiteboard.
Since July, Zuckerberg has been talking up the metaverse idea, claiming that it holds the key to Facebook’s future — the idea that users would live, work and exercise within a digital world. The company’s Oculus virtual reality devices and services are critical to achieving that mission and vision.
Facebook has made essential investments in virtual reality and augmented reality, planning to connect its almost 3 billion users via various devices and apps. On Tuesday, the business announced ambitions to generate 10,000 jobs in the European Union over the next five years to assist in developing the metaverse.
Bloomberg had noted that Facebook seemed to control meta.com: “The web address meta.com presently redirects to meta.org, the home of a scientific research discovery tool established under the aegis of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which the Facebook CEO co-founded.”
However, one insider informed me that the company is now leaning away from the term Meta. At the same time, another said that the new name could have nothing to do with the metaverse. According to both sources, Zuckerberg wants the latest name to surprise – to be something unexpected. (Katie Notoupolous has some proposals at BuzzFeed that you may vote on; they are all bad, and I say this with love.)
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