"LOREM IPSUM "
The biggest branding move of 2021 was Facebook becoming Meta.
The change to Meta is a basic rebrand at corporate level. Many are noting the similarities in logo design to Belgian start-up brand M-Sense and comparing Facebook’s rebrand to earlier efforts by the tobacco and fossil fuel industries to detract attention from ongoing reputational challenges. Hardly worth writing home about.
The Meta story only really gets interesting when you look at this rebrand through the lens of brand equity, brand architecture and the war on talent.
That’s when you start to see that this rebrand is not purely cosmetic after all, but rather reflects the future strategic direction of the parent company and signs of a “space race” between Meta and TenCent to dominate the metaverse.
Brand architecture
Facebook will now become one of the main product brands underneath the brand umbrella of Meta alongside Whatsapp, Messenger, Instagram and virtual reality platform Oculus acquired in 2014.
Meta offers a brand umbrella which will see more and more disconnected brands begin to sit beneath it as the company seeks to acquire and develop software to create a platform where users can “socialize, work, learn, play, shop and create” across various apps.
Similar to Google’s abrupt rebrand to Alphabet in 2015, Meta as a parent company allows Zuckerberg and his leadership to expand their domain significantly, unite its widening interests and product lines and become a fully-fledged technology conglomerate.
It is also an attempt to separate out its money-making business from all the other Meta businesses that require investment. It allows the best of both worlds – to both protect from association with any future false starts, and giving new projects breathing space to find their own identity away from the Facebook mega-brand.
We would suggest looking to LVMH’s CEO Bernard Arnault as an example for Zuckerberg and his leadership team to follow – Arnault leads a large house of brands where the holding company stays quiet with little impact on consumers and lets the product brands do the talking.
Brand equity
Facebook employees have often used the term “brand tax” to refer to the negative impact of Facebook on its other brands. With the new corporate structure, Meta can always argue that each company within its organization operates independently of Facebook (the product brand).
So the rebrand helps high-potential brands within the current portfolio like Instagram to move “beyond” Facebook and its problems.
The war on talent
Corporate brands are important on several levels – from supplier relationships to employer branding. All of these have been affected by Facebook over the last few years – both as a product and corporate brand.
The rebrand to Meta provides an opportunity to recalibrate. Looking at GlassDoor reviews, Facebook’s ranking as a top company to work for slipped to number 23 in 2020 and has now climbed back to No. 11 in 2021. The rebrand could also bolster retention and hiring efforts for highly specialized employees involved in metaverse work for “the chance to work on something really revolutionary with a large budget.”
What’s next?
If there is a comparison to what Zuckerberg is trying to build, it exists in the form of Tencent’s WeChat – the single largest social network in China. Their ultimate goals look markedly similar: singular, all-purpose networks that can be leveraged to serve users all kinds of other services.
WeChat is often considered the “everything app” for China’s nearly 800 million smartphone owners. Because of its ubiquity and dominance, WeChat has been a desirable, seemingly impossible-to-replicate product for social media companies. With Meta, Zuckerberg could finally create the version of WeChat that the world outside of China has thus far lacked.
From a recently leaked internal document, it’s clear that Facebook has been actively hiring employees to build products that target children as young as 6 to expand its user base. The Facebook association has hurt Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp in terms of gaining trust from younger users and so the Meta rebrand offers another opportunity to rehabilitate these high-potential apps for a younger audience.
Undoubtedly the company will still try to mediate interaction with virtual reality and augmented reality spaces through its Oculus headsets – Cambria was announced at the same time as the rebranding and Project Aria, yet unreleased, will “add a 3D layer of useful contextually relevant and meaningful information on top of the physical world”.
Based on knowledge and experience of WeChat, we also can anticipate the obstacles a Meta monster app would face: slowing user growth, a heavy reliance on ad revenue, and Western regulatory forces that seek to rein it in.
Meta has a chance to write its own story, if it can take lessons from where WeChat has stumbled.
TenCent, We Chat’s parent company, is also not resting on its laurels when it comes to the metaverse. In September alone, Tencent applied for nearly 100 metaverse-related trademarks according to Chinese financial publication Yicai. The fact that the new Meta logo also has echoes of the WeChat Channels has also not been lost on savvy users.
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