A few hours ago, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook announced at the annual Connect conference that the company along with all of its technology and applications will now come under a single name: Meta. This process of rebranding is a part of his ambition and goal to promote the metaverse, a virtual reality environment where fellow users can interact with each other on a digital space through their computers. This news comes amidst a lot of negative publicity for the company where they have been accused of being aware of all the data leaks and breaches and the whole plague of problems that users have faced for a long time. To understand this in a better way, it is important to know about rebranding.
What is rebranding?
Rebranding is the process of changing the brand identity by changing the logo, name, slogan, values and all other parts that make up the identity of the brand in the market. It is a marketing strategy to change the corporate image of the organization for the target audience.
There are many reasons for a company to go for rebranding. There are two types of rebranding, namely proactive rebranding and reactive branding. As the name suggests, proactive branding is done when a company wants to change or improve its image upon recognizing opportunities to grow and innovate. Rebranding often helps in expanding and exploring new and untapped market avenues. Reactive rebranding is done as a reaction to existing problems or a need to discontinue or change the current brand image. It is a situation which is influenced mostly by external forces like audience, target and market.
What are the advantages of rebranding?
- Brings change- Rebranding brings a change in the audiences perception of the brand. The company might be depicting a monotonous and dull image, and rebranding is a welcome idea in such a case.
- Connect with new audience- The prime advantage of rebranding is the ability to reach a new audience. The new brand image can highlight all the new and improved aspects of the company.
- More relevant- Rebranding helps in keeping the company up-to-date and in flow with the current market trends. It is crucial for companies to keep up with the market and not slow down the pace and becoming irrelevant.
- Showcase new features- New and improved features and characteristics that the company offers to customers can be showcases through rebranding. The company can also show what are the benefits and perks that give them an edge over their competitors.
In the previous years, many companies rebranded through logos, like Starbucks, Instagram and Airbnb etc. These companies recreated their logos to be brighter, easier to remember and more minimalistic in accordance with the trends. Among these companies was Google, who announced that they would be coming under a parent company called Alphabet in 2015, and also made the decision of changing the font and overall look of how google was written. It included changing the font into ComicSans, which was regarded as a very friendly and welcoming font. They also changed the logos of all their applications so that they included the four colors of the brand. This decision was a very smart and planned decision by the team at Google because the color scheme that they adopted can fit into any situation without needing any adjustments, meaning that advertisements and posts could have any item or image, the logo works complementary to everything.
Meta would be the parent company that comprises of Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram and more. They have announced that there would not be any change in the logos of the individual applications with regards to the change in their names. One of the many reasons for the rebranding was the fact that the company brand and the brand of one of its applications were the same, which created confusion. The news of this rebranding received severe backlash from all over the world. The audience is divided in its thought towards the whole thing. There have been criticisms that due to the pending allegations and concerns over the company, this news is a distraction from the issues. The CEO has said that the current situation does not have any relation to this big news, and that thinking of it like that would be ridiculous.
Accepting change is difficult especially when the brand identity has been the same for a long time. However it paves way for innovation and motivation, which are the key drivers of the world.