More than just a new look.. Why did Facebook change its brand after 17 years of its founding?

In "Romeo and Juliet," William Shakespeare's masterpiece, Juliet argues with her lover that his family name is not important: "What is the significance of a name? A rose under any name would smell sweet too."

Juliet means that in the relationship between the two lovers, names do not mean anything.

While this meaning is undoubtedly wrapped in a sweet romance, in the business world in particular, everyone knows that the name most of the time is "everything".

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Therefore, when the global technical website The Verge leaked the news that Facebook is about to change its brand name, the matter was widely heard among users of the largest social network around the world. It is true that the change will not extend to the name of the “Facebook” social networking platform, but rather is related to the name of the parent company, but the question marks increased, especially since the change coincided with the company’s announcement of its new virtual reality product, “Metaverse”, which represents a completely different turn in the world. The path of the global company founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 as one of the most influential global social media platforms. (2)

This move - although it has been expected for a relatively long time by veteran analysts and marketers - is a clear signal from Facebook that it is no longer just a social media platform, and that it is on the same path as the giants who are not satisfied with one field.

Remember that "Amazon" started as an online bookstore, and later turned into the largest e-commerce platform selling "everything else"!

Rebranding

In general, branding is one thing, and rebranding is quite another.

The conditions and criteria that govern the naming of a startup company that is still taking its first steps will definitely differ from the conditions and criteria of a company that is in the market, and may dominate it, and decides to change its brand name with a strategic decision that avoids current problems or opens the door to future opportunities.

Rebranding is a marketing strategy based on changing the identity of the company or its mental image with its customers, for reasons that the company deems necessary for its survival or improving its performance and growth in the coming period.

This change may include the name of the company, it may include its commercial logo, and it may include changing the font, color and presentation.

Although rebranding appears at first glance to be common for large companies, in fact it also applies to small and emerging companies and even brands of freelancers, where this strategy is an integral part of marketing strategies regardless of the sizes of the institutions and their fame and the number of branches and employees .

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More than just a "New Look"

When the Mars Chocolate Company released its new product, Raider, a chocolate stick filled with caramel, in 1967, the product found a good spread in Europe and spread to America. As a result, the company decided to launch into global markets at the beginning of the nineties, to take the most important step regarding its product, which is to change its name from “Reader” chocolate - although it has lasted more than 20 years - to “Twix” chocolate, simply because the global market has Different rules in dealing with brands. (4)

Internationalization remains one of the most important drivers for rebranding both companies and their products.

According to statistics, nearly 60% of small businesses around the world have global customers, and 72% of small business founders plan to expand abroad, while 96% of businesses see an opportunity to expand their local activity abroad.

These numbers necessarily necessitate amending the company's brand or its products to keep pace with its plans to spread abroad, especially when its brand has a very local and incomprehensible impact on the foreign ear and eye.

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Google announced in 2015 that it had rebranded its parent company to Alphabet, with the Google name remaining for its digital products.

But changing the brand name is not only related to the globalization of products and services to suit other markets, but may also be due to the expansion of the production of services and products that are much more diversified than the original brand can afford.

For example, in 2015 Google announced that it had rebranded its parent company to Alphabet, with the Google name remaining for its digital products.

This change allows the company to expand beyond the scope of its work as a digital organization and enter into other areas, which expands its scope of revenues and future projects, and relieves it of any trust issues that its customers may feel in the long term.

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Keep the name and change the job

When Steve Jobs returned to the position of CEO of "Apple" in 1997, after a series of crises and problems that surrounded him, his coming was an advertisement for a different management method based on creativity, and one of the most important means of expressing this change was to modify the company's logo from an apple full of colors Rainbow to apple metallic color.

The bitten apple remained the same, but just changing its colors was considered a message to Apple users and investors that there is a comprehensive change that the company will witness, whether in its management style or the quality of its products in the coming years, which it actually was.

Later, Apple produced its greatest products, such as the iPhone and iPad.

With the advent of 2007, with the new trend of "Apple" in the manufacture of unprecedented innovative products, Steve Jobs announced the dropping of the word "computers" from the name of the Apple company, to become Apple Ltd. Jobs' justification at the time was that the word "computer" referred to just one of the products that Apple was developing, which now included music devices, phones, and tablets, which necessitated the removal of this word from the company's branding. In other words, this action was a sign that Apple was no longer just a company specializing in developing computers, but a company that aims to change people's lifestyle technically. (5)

This shift in rebranding with a broader commercial meaning, while retaining the basic name of the company, is one of the most famous shifts in the world of technical companies and cannot be limited, for example, the company “Snapchat”, responsible for developing the famous video application, changed its brand in 2016 to Snap Inc., which allowed it to launch products outside of social media when it presented the world with its first pair of camera glasses called Spectacles, reinventing itself completely differently from its original identity.

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Repositioning in the eyes of the client

As for "Walmart", the giant American retail store, his vision for rebranding did not include changing its ancient name, but rather changing the meaning of the logo.

With its great reputation as a store that provides services and products in the American market at the lowest prices, in 2007 Walmart stores changed the sub-sentence in its slogan from "Always Lowest Prices" to "Save Money, Live Better".

This seemingly simple change helped Walmart repositioning in the eyes of its customers, from a company that aims to attract customers and entice them with its low prices (the meaning here may refer to Walmart's interest and interest in making more profit) to a company that is keen to save its customers' money And not to waste it and care about providing a better life for them.

A big difference between the stakeholders helped the company to attract more customers, to become in 2010 one of the largest companies around the world in terms of revenue, according to the classification of "Forbes" for that year.

Changing by repositioning in front of current and future clients does not include only preaching an era, a new administration, or a new principle, but sometimes for propaganda purposes that keep pace with the times, sending signals about escaping from stereotypes. The Shell oil company, for example, changed its brand - while retaining the name - about 8 times since 1909, while the current logo of the Pepsi company for soft drinks has nothing to do with its first logos since its founding at the end of the nineteenth century. Certainly, there has been an evolution in Shell services and Pepsi products, but changing the brand for the two companies was a necessity to keep pace with the developments of the era in publicity. (5)

Repositioning also means bending over the storm. When the movie “Super Size Me” was released in 2004, which is considered one of the harshest films that attack fast food restaurants and the dangers to the health of millions of people from the foods it serves, it was natural to face " McDonald's" has stormy problems, and that the film will affect its sales negatively, given that if fast food is mentioned, the first thing that comes to mind is the international chain of McDonald's restaurants.

In the face of this escalation in the attack on fast food restaurants, McDonald's has spent a huge budget in its strategy to modify the impact of its brand and transform it from mere fast food restaurants to fast food restaurants that contain some healthy ingredients, by increasing the level of organic vegetables and salads on the menus for those who desire them And announcing that there are no preservatives in food ingredients.

McDonald's didn't change its products, name, or character, but it did change its appearance to bend the storm.

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Well .. why is Facebook changing its brand now?

It can be said that the answer to this question is all of the above reasons combined. In fact, the company had hinted at rebranding for so long that former Facebook chief marketing officer Antonio Lucio suggested that the company start separating the company's branding from the communication app three years ago. The suggestion was that the name be changed and simplified to something like "FB Inc" or "FACEBOOK Corporation".

But the reality of the company and the challenges it faces needed more than abbreviating the word “Facebook” in two letters, or re-writing the name by writing it in capital letters only. On top of these challenges comes the strongly declining reputation of the company that started the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the company was implicated during the 2016 US elections, when it was accused of collecting personal data of millions of users and using it for political propaganda. This blow was one of the biggest storms that shook Facebook's brand credibility among huge segments of its users, and it reverberated years later whenever the privacy profile was opened up on the Internet. (9)

According to Dr. Dustin York, Professor of Communication at the University of Maryville, “Rebranding the holding company is a strategic move with increasing objections to Facebook’s role in affecting users’ mental health, information misrepresentation, and privacy breaches. This bad reputation of Facebook should be separated from the rest of the company’s products.” Johnson & Johnson does not put the name of its holding company on each of its products, if a particular product loses the trust of the customer, the negative impact will certainly not reach the Johnson & Johnson brand, and the matter will remain limited to the product Only. The new name of Facebook Holdings should separate its products, and represent the vision of the new company, the Metaverse Project."

As for the second storm, and perhaps the most serious, it is related to the increasing signs about the teenage and young generation - the so-called generation z - largely reluctance to Facebook and its services, and its tendency to other social media that depend on entertainment, away from comments, likes and photo sharing, which was considered a real alarm for the The giant company that dominates a large amount of social media in the world, and an indication of the need for a major inevitable change to accommodate the new generations. This danger was expressed by the international newspaper Wired with an article entitled “Teens do not use Facebook, but they cannot escape from it either,” in which it stated that many of the accounts of teenagers are used by parents. (10)

As for the reason that seems more important for the Facebook administration’s decision to change the brand of the parent company, and to convert the Facebook logo into one of the products that belong to a larger brand, it is the project that the company is working on to break into the virtual world of “Metaverse”, which means The company has shifted from being a company that focuses on the world of social media to a company whose services include other types of technology, especially virtual reality. Reports say that Facebook has already hired more than 10,000 technicians to build its new venture, which includes making virtual reality glasses that Zuckerberg believes will soon replace smartphones. (11)

Although the new name is surrounded by walls of extreme secrecy so far, many reports have predicted that it may have something to do with the name "Horizon", which means "the horizon" in Arabic, which is the name of a version of a virtual reality product that the company began developing during past years.

Other speculation is that Facebook could use the "meta" designation as a new name for the parent company.

In the end, it can be said that the rebranding of any company is either for proactive motives related to taking advantage of a new opportunity, entering new markets or expanding the target audience, or for responsive motives where the company faces problems with its reputation, legal problems or competition Fierce makes rebranding an important way out in the face of the crisis.

In the case of Facebook, the renaming has certainly become an offensive and defensive necessity at the same time.

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