Image: © sitthiphong/Stock.adobe.com
While nothing in its corporate structure will change, Facebook has decided that putting its name in all caps might give it a fresh start.
Corporate rebrands are a dime a dozen in the tech world. In some cases there are changes because a company doesn’t want to be limited by one product, while others try to placate all partners in a large conglomerate and fail miserably.
Now, however, Facebook has decided that it doesn’t tell you enough that all of its products are made by the company. In a blog post, the company’s chief marketing officer, Antonio Lucio, revealed that the Facebook corporate logo will now be ‘FACEBOOK’.
“The new branding was designed for clarity and uses custom typography and capitalisation to create visual distinction between the company and app,” Lucio said.
In case you missed it, in June all of the company’s other products such as WhatsApp and Instagram officially added ‘from Facebook’ to their names. Now, with the subsequent redesign, they will be branded as ‘WhatsApp from FACEBOOK’ and ‘Instagram from FACEBOOK’.
This isn’t just an invisible name change – soon you will start seeing FACEBOOK at the bottom of the Instagram login page and any of its other products. “People should know which companies make the products they use,” Lucio said.
However, somewhat confusingly, the social media site Facebook will keep its own lower-case logo as it remains one product under the FACEBOOK parent brand. Which begs the question, should it be Facebook from FACEBOOK?
Image: Facebook
Shedding the past
There is no denying that Facebook is a company under immense pressure, with a new logo no doubt being one attempt to try and distance itself from a brand tarnished by scandals and accusations of power grabs.
Its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is now appearing in front of US and international committees on an almost regular basis, whether it’s about Facebook’s attempts to launch its Libra cryptocurrency or about its alleged prior knowledge of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
One of Facebook’s biggest political critics, US senator Elizabeth Warren, was not buying into any attempt to claim things will be different at the tech giant after a brand change.
Facebook can rebrand all they want but they can’t hide the fact that they are too big and powerful. It’s time to #BreakUpBIGTECH. https://t.co/suHSuR4AAx
— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) November 5, 2019
It is understandable that, as Bloomberg has revealed, Facebook did even consider ditching the name completely in a bid for the parent company to distance itself from the social network.
This, Lucio said in an interview, “would have been perceived as disingenuous by the rest of the world”.
So to summarise, FACEBOOK sees Facebook as a brand with a bad rep, but FACEBOOK wants you to remember the name when you open up WhatsApp from FACEBOOK or Instagram from FACEBOOK. So what is the future of Facebook under FACEBOOK?
It’s enough to make your head spin.
