Meta, formerly Facebook, would like you to forget their problems. But is a new name and a few new products enough to help Facebook accomplish that task?
The internet’s memory is long, and Facebook has tarnished itself so badly, no new coat of paint could ever cover up the rot. Still, a new direction and name could help the company shake some of their bad image, and perhaps bring in new customers. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook Meta’s CEO, is hopeful that this rebranding will lead to new opportunities for the company. With the new focus on the “Metaverse,” Facebook’s virtual reality playground, perhaps it could be a new beginning. Or perhaps it could be a huge flop he has bet the company on.
After all, it’s not like anything else, not even amazing games, have helped VR reach the mainstream.
In This Article:
Welcome to the Zuck Metaverse
Mark Zuckerberg: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard
Zuckerberg: just ask
Zuckerberg: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
Friend: what!? how’d you manage that one?
Zuckerberg: people just submitted it
Zuckerberg: i don’t know why
Zuckerberg: they “trust me”
Zuckerberg: dumb fucks– an early chat exchange between Mark Zuckerberg and a friend shortly after creating Facebook. Facebook started as a way to stalk people, mostly women.
A Branding Problem in Four Parts
Facebook has a branding problem. That is, people know what Facebook claims it’s about, and what it’s actually about. Facebook talks about connecting people, but it creates bubbles, larger political divides, and even helps people come together… to plan violence against other groups. The network has become so rife with hate that Facebook outages actually reduced hate crimes, and studies have shown a direct link between exposure to hate on Facebook and hate-related attacks in the U.S. and Germany. The genocide in Myanmar was, according to the U.N., largely the fault of hate and misinformation that Facebook allowed to spread on its platform.
Besides the violence Facebook spreads, it’s also been the go-to place for COVID-19 misinformation. While Facebook will often label COVID-19 misinformation, they do not outright ban it. As a result, pro-pandemic falsehoods have spread, with those engaging with Facebook more often also more likely to hold beliefs that worsen the pandemic, like anti-mask or anti-vaccination beliefs. Those who hold these beliefs simply ignore or mock Facebook’s warnings. They do nothing to stop the spread of deadly misinformation.
Outside of the death cult that Facebook has become, it has another problem: it’s based on stealing every bit of information they can from you. From what apps and websites you’re using outside of Facebook, where you shop and what you buy, your location, who you interact with, your political beliefs, your sexuality, who you’re interested in, your income level, and much, much more. Facebook has woven its way into every part of your life, social and personal. They use this for hyper-focused ad targeting. Use of Facebook means you’re selling your conversations, shopping habits, and your personal life to use the service. People are fed up with this business model that could become increasingly dangerous with AI.
Finally, there’s another problem with Facebook: it’s anti-competitive. If antitrust laws were actually enforced in the United States anymore, Facebook would not be the unstoppable behemoth it is today. Facebook saw Instagram as a competitor. Rather than focus on image sharing within Facebook, they likely believed that Instagram could eventually add things like links, stories, or text to images with text generators, completely toppling Facebook. Instagram was more popular with teenagers and even the original Facebook generation, those who were in college when Facebook began. So, rather than compete, Facebook bought Instagram.
Facebook asked users to install a VPN for cash. They used that to track all of their internet use. What they found was that people used WhatsApp a lot, especially people with contacts and loved ones outside of the United States. So they bought WhatsApp. Soon others followed, like Oculus. They even tried to buy out Snapchat, but decided to simply copy its features with Instagram and Facebook “Stories.” Facebook became a company that was too big to fail, and woven into every part of people’s lives. Its negative influence followed. Now, it’s almost impossible to compete with Facebook, as they’ll either copy your features or buy you out. The lone exception seems to be TikTok, largely supported by the Chinese government, perhaps the strongest defense against Facebook: state-level support.
A New Brand Umbrella
“On a more functional and technical basis, I think that there was just a lot of confusion and awkwardness about having the company brand be also the brand of one of the social media apps.”
– Mark Zuckerberg on why Facebook had to become Meta
No, not a brand new umbrella, the thing I have to buy about once a year because I keep breaking them. A new brand umbrella. The idea is that, once a company has acquired too many other brands, the original branding no longer works. Facebook owns Instagram, another social network, Facebook Messenger, their own messaging app, WhatsApp, another messaging app, and Oculus, VR hardware and service that will be the center of their so-called “Metaverse.” It’s all too much to try to relate to the incredibly negative Facebook brand.
Google did this with Alphabet. Google’s still around, but what does a search engine have to do with AI driving cars (WayMo), a phone OS (Android), or your thermostat (Nest), besides collecting data to sell to advertisers on search results? Like Facebook, the only thing that connects all of their brands is the fact that they’re doing the thing customers hate: invading privacy for profit. That’s why a new brand umbrella, one that customers largely forget about, can help shield that bad brand image from following them into other products. It serves as a single brand, separate from the image of any of the other products. You could hate Facebook but love WhatsApp, and not think about how they’re the same company because Facebook doesn’t own WhatsApp, Meta does. It’s a small bit of mental insulation.
New name, same plan: #BreakUpBigTech.https://t.co/5QLecxkfBV
— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) October 29, 2021
This isn’t just something done in the tech industry. Pepsi owns an umbrella brand, Yum!. You likely know Yum! by other names, like KFC, Pizza Hut, or Taco Bell. What, you never wondered why you could find Taco Bell and KFC together on highway rest stops before? Or how Pepsi will only sell Mountain Dew Baja Blast in Taco Bell? Nestlé owns Poland Springs, the L’Oréal brand umbrella, as well as Purina. Brand umbrellas help fit certain products and services together that may or may not be directly related, but work better with one parent company over another. You don’t think of Maybelline as belonging to the same brand as Nestlé, but it makes more sense under the L’Oréal brand. Facebook wants this kind of distance from their own brand as well, so you don’t connect their new Metaverse with the brand of Facebook.
New Products, New Identity
The Metaverse is tied tightly to a few things: virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and commerce. The latter seems to be Meta’s primary income source, but the company is, of course, just Facebook with a new name. Meta will be able to capture more data than ever before, with headsets that not only watch and scan you, but can scan your surroundings as well, including object detection. Imagine telling Facebook every product that’s in your house. With the Metaverse, that’ll be easier than ever before.
The Metaverse sounds like a sci-fi project. Without the knowledge that this is a Facebook company, it would sound very cool. Virtual spaces, virtual commerce and even real-world products, previewed in 3D VR and AR, hand tracking, facial tracking, hyper-realistic and fun avatars, and more. It’s what sci-fi has imagined our future to look like. It’s Second Life, but blended with AR and VR. Maybe the fact that Second Life never became mainstream and AR/VR hasn’t either will doom the Metaverse to failure, but Meta (formerly Facebook), has the money to continue to push it and work on it. The one thing Meta (you may remember them as Facebook) really needs people to do though, is separate Facebook’s identity from Meta. Facebook Meta really needs users to not think of the way that Facebook violated their privacy when they put on a headset that can record their house and everyone and everything in it.
Facebook—now Meta—has had its eye on VR for some time now. They bought Oculus, introducing one of the lowest cost headsets around, the Oculus Quest. Now it’ll be known as the Meta Quest, of course, but that’s, again, to fix a branding problem. The Oculus, after Facebook bought it, became a Facebook product. Users had to log in with a Facebook account just to use their hardware. What Facebook failed to realize is that many of the people who are into VR are more likely to be more technical, and therefore understand the deeper privacy problems with a Facebook account. The move was highly unpopular, and many VR enthusiasts shied away from the platform, even if they already had a Facebook account. This was just one more thing Facebook could use to spy on them. Going forward, it’ll be Meta branded, and won’t require a Facebook login. However, maybe one day it’ll require a Meta login. But Meta (formerly Facebook) doesn’t have the brand image of Facebook, right? It’s brand new, after all.
The Desperately Needed Meta Rebrand
“One of the reasons I started Facebook was that at the time you could use the internet to find almost anything. Information, news, movies, music, shopping. Except for the thing that matters most of all, people.”
– Mark Zuckerberg, October 2021, discussing Meta rebranding
As Facebook, now Meta, moves on to other products, it becomes obvious that they can’t bring the tarnished brand of Facebook along with them. The Facebook brand has gotten in the way of their Oculus product. Now it’s a headset people recommend against buying unless users 1) Already have a Facebook account, 2) Don’t care that they’re selling their privacy, and 3) Can’t afford something better. It’s not a bad headset, but it comes with caveats because it’s attached to the Facebook brand. When Apple says, “You need to sign in with your iCloud account to use Apple Music,” no one bats an eye. It’s Apple, what’s the big deal? But when Facebook does the same thing, it’s a red flag. That’s because people know Facebook for collecting user data to sell ads, and increasing hate and violence on its platform.
https://twitter.com/SuchethSajeev/status/1453964426638356488?s=20
With the Meta branding, it’s already easy to see how people, even knowing that Meta is Facebook, can disconnect from that. You’ll buy a Meta Quest. You’ll sign on with a Meta account. You’ll access the Metaverse. It’s hard to remember that, at the core of it all is Facebook, and they may still make their money collecting data from the Metaverse. While we can sit down now and exclaim, “Facebook is Meta, Meta is Facebook,” it may be harder to see that in a few years. Those nasty Facebook Papers that reveal wrongdoings at the company? That’s Facebook’s problem, not Meta’s. The rebranding helps Meta, and even Facebook’s other products like Instagram and WhatsApp, split off from the dirtiness of Facebook.
But That’s Not What This is About?
Well, at least according to Zuckerberg. According to him, the Facebook leaks and whistleblowing, “had nothing to bear on this. Even though I think some people might want to make that connection, I think that’s sort of a ridiculous thing. If anything, I think that this is not the environment that you would want to introduce a new brand in.”
That’s a ridiculous explanation. Why would Facebook do this now if it’s not the right time for it? After all, according to Mark Zuckerberg, he’s wanted to rebrand Facebook since 2012 and 2014, when Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp. So why now? This has apparently been in progress for 6 months, what’s a delay of 1-2 months to let this current cycle of bad news run its course? Why not wait out these leaks, wait until the Metaverse has been released and is catching on and has a brand of its own to build off of?
The simplest explanation would be that Zuckerberg is lying again.
After all, he starts his own press conference talking about how Facebook was for connecting people, while others point out and share chat logs that show that, from the beginning, it was one immature boy trying to collect girls’ information.
In fact, the leaks show Zuckerberg and Facebook lie about a lot. They knew the damage their app was doing to communities, forming bubbles, creating violent groups, fostering anti-vax and pro-pandemic information, and destroying the self esteem of impressionable teenagers, especially teen girls, all while allowing the app to continue without warnings while they work on a better way to run their app. Facebook’s even denied the existence of so-called “shadow profiles,” something ex-employees and anonymous leakers claim exist. These are profiles built on people who haven’t signed up for Facebook, but Facebook knows they exist due to uploaded contacts, photos, and other data. They can even start to build advertising profiles in case these people ever sign up. Facebook says they don’t exist. Others say they do.
So can we believe when Facebook says the timing of their rebranding to Meta has nothing to do with a wave of particularly bad press in the past few years, culminating in leaks that confirm the worst we expected of Facebook? No. We cannot.
Will it Work?
“I think that there was just a lot of confusion and awkwardness about having the company brand be also the brand of one of the social media apps. I think it’s helpful for people to have a relationship with a company that is different from the relationship with any specific one of the products, that can kind of supersede all of that.”
– Mark Zuckerberg, on the rebrand to Meta
Maybe I’m just bad at relationships, but I’ve never had one with a company. At least not in the weird way Zuckerberg seems to be putting it. Brand loyalty isn’t a thing among services anymore. I’d bet that most people who use Facebook hate it, but see it as a necessity. People don’t think of Instagram as a subsidiary of Facebook (now Meta), though it is. They don’t worry about stuff like that. They just want to use Instagram. The same goes for WhatsApp. And Oculus users? They didn’t think of the fact that Facebook owned Oculus until they realized their fancy new VR headsets were completely reliant on Facebook.
This rebranding isn’t about some relationship with customers. It’s about bad press.
A #Facebook by any other name would be as evil. #Meta pic.twitter.com/zezAgcwz03
— Sanitary Panels (@sanitarypanels) October 29, 2021
Hate crimes, fueling a never-ending pandemic, and leaks that reveal everything from right-wing bias to knowledge that the app was hurting children with no attempts to change. Facebook’s image is in the gutter. However, just as Google’s rebranding to a parent company, Alphabet, didn’t work, neither will Facebook’s rebranding to the generic-sounding name, “Meta.” It’s a lazy, uninspired name that won’t ever become Facebook’s brand identity. Meta will carry with it the damage that Facebook incurred, both in the real world, and in Zuck’s Metaverse.
As for me? I’ll do what I can to make sure you never forget that Meta (formerly Facebook) is still just Facebook. It’ll be fun to come up with ways to do that.
Sources:
- I. Bonifacic, Engadget
- Alex Heath, The Verge
- Kyle Orland, Ars Technica
- David Pierce, Protocol
- Victoria Song, Gizmodo