What's in a name? Companies and organizations face challenges when rebranding

Facebook.

There are few words in the American lexicon more top-of-mind these days than the moniker of this now-mammoth online social media and social networking service.

The name "Facebook" is derived from the face book directories often given to U.S. university students, especially when they first enter college.

Facebook was launched in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and a small group of friends from Harvard University and the name seems instantly recognizable, even to those who have never spent a moment on the internet.

The Facebook app, in fact, is used today by an estimated 3 billion people around the globe.

This fall, Zuckerberg decided to drop the name — or at least, relegate it to second-tier status.

"It is time for us to adopt a new company brand to encompass everything we do," Zuckerberg said in an Oct. 28 video intended for Facebook employees.

"Starting today, our company is now Meta. From now on, we're going to be metaverse first, not Facebook first."

The company formerly known as Facebook began to be traded Dec. 1 under the stock ticker MVRS -- effectively demoting Facebook's service to being just one of the Meta company's subsidiaries, alongside Instagram and WhatsApp, rather than the overarching brand.

"I see this as a defensive rebrand to compartmentalize Facebook's baggage," said Mike Baxter, copy director of the Cape Girardeau office of Jump, an advertising agency based in St. Louis.

Baxter, who works under the leadership of Jump's creative director in Cape Girardeau, David Coleman, is a "messaging" guy, the person who spends much of his work time on naming and brand strategy for Jump's clients.

Baxter, a Columbia, Missouri, native, came to Cape Girardeau in 2012 to work for Red Letter Communications and moved to Jump in 2018.

Indeed, Facebook has taken a battering because of a series of crises -- from its alleged involvement in Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, to a 2018 privacy scandal involving Cambridge Analytica, to this year's damaging revelations from former Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen.

Misinformation, content moderation failures plus revelations about the negative effect Facebook and its ancillary platforms have on some users' mental health pushed Zuckerberg into a startling decision -- turn the page and put a new name on the book.

Reasons to rebrand/rename

Baxter said eliminating a perceived negative public relations problem is one of the reasons for a company to undertake a name change.

"ValuJet had a crash and successfully rebranded as AirTran -- and it was later bought by Southwest Airlines," he said.

Another reason to rename is to evolve a brand and make it more modern, Baxter said.

"Sometimes you want to grow beyond your core service offering and get beyond what you do currently," he said.

"Charter wanted to cut the baggage of being an old cable company and created Spectrum. Comcast created Xfinity. Kentucky Fried Chicken became KFC for a couple of reasons: It wanted to drop the word "fried," plus the state of Kentucky had filed a trademark on the name of the state."

A third reason to rename, although not a road commonly taken, is for short-term publicity.

"IHOP got a lot of attention when it temporarily went to IHOB," Baxter said, noting the International House of Pancakes' brief move -- later reversed -- to substitute one letter for another in the summer of 2018, generating buzz about the restaurant's new offering of beef patties.

"We knew we had a very tough job to do to convince people that we take our burgers as seriously as we take our pancakes," Stephanie Peterson, IHOP's executive director of communications, said at the time. "So, we went bold with the campaign."

Baxter points proudly to Jump's work in the rebrand of Memorial Health System in Springfield, Illinois, in October 2020.

"We redesigned the logo for the first time since the 1970s and presented a new symbol of health. Going to MHS also promoted the notion of 'connected care,' that Memorial was not just a group of hospitals but a whole system of caregiving under a single name," he said.

"We produced videos explaining the change, brought all the websites of the various hospitals together and coordinated their Facebook advertising, among many other things."

Caution

"We have to keep in mind, always, what is in the best interest of the client," Baxter said, adding a rebrand should be carefully considered and he is a believer in some time-tested methods of customer research, including the use of focus groups.

"When you rebrand a hospital system, for example, you change the building signs, you rewrap vehicles with the new name or symbol and you have to produce new uniforms for everyone, among other costs. Rebranding can be expensive but is often worth the cost," he added.

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