This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on October 20th, 2021.
That Facebook is reportedly changing its name shows signs that one of its biggest strengths is becoming a weakness. It is also the starting gun for Mark Zuckerberg’s next big bet — the metaverse.
“People should know which companies make the products they use.”
That’s what Facebook’s marketing chief Antonio Lucio wrote in a blog post almost two years ago. At the time he was introducing a new logo intended to distinguish the company Facebook from the products it provides – Instagram, WhatsApp, virtual reality company Oculus, and the well-known blue app that goes by the name Facebook itself. Sharing a corporate name with one of the products can be confusing, but given the brand recognition it has also been an asset. Everyone knows Facebook.
The question is whether that asset is now turning into a liability. The tech site The Verge reports that CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to rename the company. The blue app will keep its name, while the parent group on top of it gets a new name and houses Instagram and WhatsApp. If the rumors are correct, Facebook is doing the same thing Google did when it renamed its mothership Alphabet.
Zuckerberg, however, has different and more pressing reasons to change the name than his neighbor in Silicon Valley. Google wanted to expand and be associated with more than just search. Facebook, by contrast, wants to leave its current associations behind.
The first hint that Facebook as a brand had become problematic was the camera glasses the company released in September. They were called “Ray-Ban Stories”. The website mentions a partnership with Facebook, but nowhere on the product itself can you find the logo or the name. Perhaps it was deemed unlikely that people would want to walk around with a Facebook logo on their face, even a discreet one tucked onto a glasses frame.
There are two plausible reasons the name has become a burden for the social media giant.
The first is that Facebook has had a hard time shaking off the recurring scandals around election interference, harm to teenage girls, and privacy. Each controversy stains the brand a little, and creates associations that bleed into the rest of the product portfolio. If the blue Facebook app has handled something badly, it can spill over to Instagram because everything looks like one and the same company. A clearer separation could be preferable. The method has worked before. Scandals at YouTube have been kept reasonably separate from Google, even though they share the same parent.
The second reason is Zuckerberg’s plan ahead, his next big step for the company. He has told The Verge that “we will go from people primarily seeing us as a social media company to being a metaverse company”.
So what is the “metaverse”? It can be described, simply, as a new kind of internet, where in a game-like 3D environment you can shop, work, play and communicate with others. Facebook wants to help build that infrastructure – the underlying system on which this vision can become reality.
The bet is enormous, and broad. Facebook already has more than 10,000 employees working on hardware for augmented reality, expected to be a central piece of its metaverse project. Add to that the people working on virtual reality bets like Oculus and the virtual world Horizon Worlds.
If Zuckerberg pulls this off, he will have created a new digital world that runs in parallel with the one he steers day to day. In that context it is logical to leave the old one – with its positive and negative associations alike – behind. Zuckerberg’s metaverse is meant to be seen as something else entirely. And as a chance to start over – with new ambitions and a new communications plan.