Facebook Rebranding Case Analysis

Facebook never seems to be out of the news. If it isn’t privacy issues or ill-considered remarks by its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, it’s the volatility of its share price. This month, the big web designer news is that the Facebook family of companies is changing its name to “Meta.” This is to better reflect the evolving digital landscape in which it operates.

Zuckerberg, who has held the top job at Facebook for more than 17 years, is keen to push ahead with the plans. According to estimates, he ploughed more than $10 billion (£7.8 billion) into the rebranding project this year. This confirms what observers suspected for at least six months.

Zuckerberg says that the original branding setup was awkward. Many responsive web design services would agree. Facebook was using the name of one of its social media platforms (Facebook) to also describe the entire family of companies. It wasn’t sustainable. Facebook was an app, and a family of services and hardware, that included Instagram, Quest and Whatsapp.

In changing the name to Meta, Zuckerberg is taking a leaf out of Google’s playbook. The California-based search giant, grouped its entire family of services under parent company Alphabet, in October 2015. Now Facebook is doing the same, albeit in its own unique way.

But what’s the benefit of this for the brand? Partly, it has to do with its tarnished image, both web development and design agencies, and Zuckerberg knows this. Over the latter half of 2021, Facebook faced near-constant criticism. This was mainly thanks to leaked documents from former employee Frances Haugen, revealing how badly the company protected user data.

However, the CEO says that none of this had any bearing on his decision to change the name, that had been in the works since at least 2012, or 2014. He insists, that it had been roughly around the time when Instagram became a part of the group.

Here’s a summary of what you need to know:

• The word “meta” comes from the Greek word “beyond”
• The brand change symbolises the fact that there is always more to build
• Meta is a preparation for our collective VR future

Where Does the Metaverse Concept Come From?

Meta is an abbreviation of “metaverse,” a concept that originates from the dystopian 1990s novel, Snow Crash. In the thriller, people flee from the crumbling real world, to become more immersed in the digital one. Zuckerberg hopes that people will see Meta as the utopian ideal that he wants to create, hence the name change.

Whether the change in tack will work, remains to be seen. Zuckerberg is potentially gambling here. Facebook is far from a utopia. There is no reason to suspect that a new name will change this in the future. So long as there are humans using digital systems, there will be problems.

In fact, the name change could be outright laughable in years to come, depending on what happens. If more problems emerge with Facebook’s services, utopia will give way to dystopia – if it hasn’t already.

Zuckerberg, though, is clearly still committed to the idea of creating a digital universe that parallels the real world. He firmly believes that the future of online interaction will be immersive and 3D (which may explain why he purchased Oculus in 2014 for $2 billion). Meta isn’t just hardware, he says, it will also allow people to engage more deeply with digital spaces.

Zuckerberg doesn’t want to go into details right now. However, he believes that, in the future, people will have full-blown avatars or holograms of themselves in physical space. He wants users to be able to appear next to each other, even if they are on different continents.

There aren’t many details yet of what form Meta will take. But Zuckerberg says that NFTs and smart contracts will be a part of the metaverse. The company will deeply embed economic tools into the software environment, which says, will allow people to live out their digital lives similarly to their physical ones.

What Is our Verdict as a Creative Digital Agency?

As a web development and design agency, the Meta rebranding is fascinating. Despite criticism, it is clear that Zuckerberg has a vision for how he wants the Facebook family of services to operate in the future. His goal is to take the level of interaction to the next level by making it more immersive. Hence, “Meta” is a fitting brand change.

As any branding agency knows, there is a risk to this strategy. Meta implies a utopia, while Facebook is often associated with the precise opposite. If the company is going to succeed, it will need web designers and programmers who anticipate the social consequences. Furthermore, it is depending heavily on user adoption. There are many reasons to believe that the wearing of VR headsets won’t explode in the future.

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