Facebook’s Meta Nightmare

Photo by Barefoot Communications on Unsplash

At several points in the last 15+ years, I have been convinced (usually incorrectly) that Facebook was about to jump the shark. For anyone under age 50, “jump the shark” is a reference to a TV show called Happy Days meaning the point at which something, henceforth, goes downhill. For anyone under age 30, that proverbial shark has already sailed. Facebook’s decade-old strategy to hold onto young users, basically buying Instagram, is also losing ground quickly to Snap and TikTok.

Following on the heels of a nightmarishly bad month, the company had a capper just in time for Halloween. Their latest latest move, rebranding this week to the not-creepy-at-all Meta, smacks of desperation. Perhaps I am again incorrectly identifying the shark-jumping moment in time. Perhaps I am biased by schadenfreude. Or perhaps I just have too much personal baggage around the perils of branding. But I've been around long enough to know one thing: changing the name of your company is almost always a bad sign.

Although Zuckerberg may just be emulating the cool kids, the motivation for the change is much more likely what it always is when companies change their name—something is fundamentally broken about the brand. Furthermore, a name change means the executives at the company know the brand is broken—enough to go through the painful, expensive, self-flagellating exercise of actually changing the name.

Think about all the examples of successful companies that have re-named themselves . . . keep thinking . . . well? Can you think of any? Most likely not. In fact, the bar for a “successful” corporate renaming is pretty much “at least it wasn't a total disaster.” Google’s name change to Alphabet fits this as-good-as-it-gets criteria—really just a dumb name for a holding company that nobody uses in everyday vernacular unless you’re a stock broker.

On the other end of the ledger are the long list of corporate name changes that were so bad they got undone (PwC’s name change to Monday, for example) or were just such thinly veiled attempts to wallpaper over something fundamentally negative about the business that people just rolled their eyes. Philip Morris became Altria, Valujet became AirTran, Comcast became Xfinity—none of those name changes altered the reality that the companies-formerly-known-as were selling addictive cigarettes, crashing planes, or providing crappy customer service.

But what may elevate Facebook’s name change to Meta into the All-Time Branding Disaster Hall of Fame is not what they’re trying to run away from, but what they want to be known for next—the “Metaverse.” Through this name change, they are throwing down the gauntlet—declaring that social media hasn’t been detrimental enough to society, that they can do even better. It’s like Philip Morris changing its name to Fentanyl Morris because it wants to be known for an even more additive product than nicotine.

Of course, as every other CEO who has thrown up a new name and logo soon discovered, Zuckerberg and team will eventually need to grapple with the negative aspects of their platform, products, and business model. Hopefully, we won’t all need to endure their instantiation of the metaverse before they do.