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Oh look, Facebook has decided to change its name.
Leave aside the fact that it actually hasn’t (Facebook will still be called Facebook—it’s a corporate rebrand, like with Alphabet/Google), this was the starting pistol for the usual tsunami of sneering from our industry, and a cacophony of cackling from the wider world.
Nothing sets the hilarity gauge fluctuating like a name change. You can set your watch by it—like leaves on the railway line or the springtime arrival of the murder hornet. The only thing that sets everyone off more than a name change is a logo change (London 2012, anyone?)
Plenty of rebrands now taken for granted by companies with strong reputations were laughed at heartily at first.
Kevin Chesters, strategy partner, Harbour Collective
But whenever we have a corporate rebrand it seems to be the signal for everyone to pile on. Hot takers gonna hot take. Can you remember a renaming that was received positively by our industry? Plenty of rebrands now taken for granted by companies with strong reputations—Diageo and British telecom 02 being two examples—were laughed at heartily at first.
The one I recall being most ridiculed was when Anderson Consulting decided to “put the accent on the future” by changing its name to Accenture. It was genuinely like the entire industry had found a warehouse full of nitrous oxide. Accenture now has a market cap of £160 billion ($218.5 billion).
It seems the best anyone can hope for from a rebrand is studied indifference, like what met Google’s renaming (again, like Meta, just the corporate holding entity) to Alphabet. But why does this happen (leaving aside the fact that we just love to mock anything that smacks of self-important navel gazing)?
It happens because humans don’t like change. We just don’t. Neophobia. It’s an evolutionary thing. Change was bad; it often meant death. So, we tend to run from it. Bristle at it. And this hasn’t changed in the modern world either.
Why take the risk?
You’d think our industry would be quite embracing of it, though—change. After all, the heart of all creativity is originality. Doing new things, reinvention, looking at things from a different angle.
Yet we seem to be the ones who do the most sneering at rebranding. The recent logo refresh by telecom company BT was a really lovely piece of design, and the rationale behind it was both coherent and cogent. Yet many people couldn’t wait to tear into it.
People also don’t ask themselves often enough why companies take the risk of a rebrand.
There are 1,001 reasons why Facebook would wish to have some form of a reset, which begins with renaming the holding company. Starting with the Carole Cadwalladr TED talk, things have not exactly been peachy for the Mark Zuckerberg-led brand in recent times (although his personal bank account doesn’t seem to have taken much of a hit).
The Brexit/Trump firehose of misinformation and alt-right toxicity that has soaked the platform doesn’t exactly make it seem like a lovely place to be. And Zuckerberg seems to be presented in the press these days as a cross between Dr. Evil, Doctor Who villain Davros and Vlad Tepes, aka the real Dracula, on a bad day.
Why corporations change
Corporate name changes make a lot of sense in many cases. It can be about rationalizing and efficiency in brand architecture. It can be about creating a motivating, cohesive name for a merging of two previous companies or brands.
It can sometimes be about creating a more language-neutral moniker for a company that is expanding across borders. It can be a signal of change or ambition in advance of an IPO or expansion. Or, like Meta, it can claim to be a signal of intent for a change of focus in terms of its core offering.
Perhaps it’s not as simple as deciding to change a name for the sake of change. That’s worth thinking about before sending that hot take out into the world.
There are so many cases of where renaming was a positive thing that led to good business outcomes. It was quite a smart decision to change the name of BackRub to Google. AOL might not have done so well if it had stuck with its original name, Quantum Computer Services. (Perhaps the same could be said for Amazon had Jeff Bezos stuck with his original magic-inspired name Cadabra).
Facebook might just be hoping someone talks about something else in the PR space other than its role in spreading QAnon lies or anti-vax propaganda.
But, whatever the reason, it’s intriguing (although not surprising from a behavioral science perspective) that our industry tends to jump on rebrands like a velociraptor with a hangover. We should always look at the reasons behind the change before immediately dismissing the output of it.
Humans tend to mock things we are scared of. And change is scary. We’re not very good at doing things differently. But if we are to bring fresh thinking and better outcomes for our clients, then maybe we should open our minds a little.
The tsunami of scoffing around a corporation’s name change is a bad thing when it comes to nurturing new ideas and ways of working.
So, back to Meta. What would I have done?
Thinking back to that The Social Network scene with Napster co-founder Sean Parker, I’d have done the opposite of what they decided back in 2005. If they wanted to drop the dirtiest connotations of the brand and moved forward, I’d have renamed the company The. “Drop Facebook. Just The. It’s cleaner.”
