Facebook’s name change represents an attempt to get rid of what the employees themselves consider a toxic brand that affects the perception of its products.
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg presented the future not only of his company, but of the Internet. The so-called “metaverse” aims to unite the real and virtual worlds, allowing us to create our own identity and join in chats, video calls, video games and even concerts with our friends and family. All this, giving special importance to NFTs and virtual content associated with our account on any site.
Zuckerberg explained that his company was going to focus on making that idea a reality from now on, and therefore it made sense to change the name to better reflect its goals: .
But as revealed by the , based on internal sources, this is a change that the company’s own employees would have requested to shake off the baggage of the “Facebook” brand. Some employees even consider that Facebook was a “tax” that they had to suffer on their products, despite the fact that these had nothing to do with the social network.
Is easy to see why. Every time we open Instagram, WhatsApp, or put on an Oculus device, we see the Facebook brand, which is increasingly associated with privacy scandals and the worst of social media. Recent revelations, based on showing serious problems in content moderation, censorship and human trafficking, have not helped.
Ironically, the reason the Facebook brand appears on those apps in the first place was because Zuckerberg wanted to “clean it up” after the Cambridge Analytica scandal by associating it with beloved community brands like Instagram or WhatsApp. That now works against you, and you run the risk of those brands ending up “dirty” by association. Instagram has suffered the most from this, with its marketing division asking for concessions such as making the Facebook brand smaller or even removing it altogether, but their requests were not approved.
Facebook, toxic brand
Soon, Facebook will disappear from those sites and we will only see “Meta”; Facebook as a brand will continue to exist, but contained only in the social network and without appearing in the rest of the company’s products.
In other words, Facebook has become a toxic brand, and Zuckerberg has isolated it from affecting the rest. Although it seems exaggerated, this has already happened at least once: at the beginning of the year, when in its terms of use. Although in practice they were not big changes, the mere presence of the brand was enough for users to reject them, due to suspicions of espionage and use of user data, against which WhatsApp has been fighting all year.
According to anonymous sources, Facebook had the same problem with , the smart speaker with a screen; internal studies showed that branding Facebook reduced public trust in that product. In the near future, the device will be renamed Meta Portal.
The big question, of course, is whether a simple name change will be enough to change this perception of the brand.
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