Facebook Reportedly Will Rebrand
Facebook has been a household name for years. Both old and young use it to communicate with family, post funny photos and videos, use it for business marketing, and a whole lot of other things. Changing a well known brand is always a risk. Usually brands change names after some negative reporting due to an incident. For example, Kentucky Fried Chicken changed to KFC, to take attention away from the word “fried”, ValuJet changed it’s name to AirTran, after one of its planes crushed in 1996 as a result of illegally transported dangerous goods or hazmat.
Facebook has received a lot of negative media attention over a course of a few years as a result of a number of congressional hearings about misinformation, personal data collection, and more recently, a whistleblower appeared before congress to testify that Facebook knew that the platform was spreading hate, misinformation, and other alarming things. This in part could explain why Facebook would want to change their brand and improve their reputation.
According to The Verge article, “Facebook is planning to change its company name next week to reflect its focus on building the metaverse, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter… is meant to signal the tech giant’s ambition to be known for more than social media and all the ills that entail.”
You may be asking yourself, what is metaverse? To the majority of users of Facebook this will sound like strange language. Metaverse is portmanteau word, a word made up of two words, “meta” and “verse”. It is an all encompassing word for the blending of the Internet with other technologies such as virtual reality, 3D. If you remember or are aware of the website, Second Life. It is kind of like that but taking it in the real world.
Now, since this is only an unconfirmed report from an unnamed insider, it is feasible that Facebook will do what Google did. Rather than change the name of the website is to create an umbrella brand that could be used to launch new projects and products. Google did that by creating the brand, Alphabet.
