
Social media company Facebook has taken a bold stride, rolling out a new branding initiative that will impact all its child companies, including Instagram and WhatsApp. The company’s standard, all-common, blue masthead will remain on its social media site, but the new logo and masthead boast an all-caps, sans-serif font, and a distinctly different red shade. The branding change may seem like a strange move by the company. However, since Facebook’s involvement in other areas of technology has seen it move from a social media giant to a tech giant, the logo may be the business’s attempt to change public perception.
Making the Company Stand Out
Facebook, the social media site, is just one of the ventures that Facebook, the company, is now involved in. With recent technology purchases such as Oculus, and delving into blockchain technology with its innovation of Libra, the company stands to benefit from its rebranding efforts to let the world know they own these technologies. The company has come under scrutiny in recent months with a series of anti-trust lawsuits instituted by the US government.
The aim is that by changing the company’s logo from the social media site’s logo, the average citizen may begin to see them in a better light. Facebook hasn’t been letting any of its acquisitions fall away from the parent company, and the company has leveraged increasing control on WhatsApp and Instagram. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg notes that the company intends to combine the underlying infrastructure of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram to provide a better user experience for existing customers.
Hedging its Bets
Anti-trust investigations against the company continue, and there is speculation that the rebranding may be an attempt to keep the company from having to split up its holdings into different individual businesses. The discussion of whether the company should be broken up or not hinges on the level of autonomy that WhatsApp and Instagram have when compared with Facebook. The rebranding may work in the company’s favor, since they intentionally state that the parent company owns all of those subsidiaries, making it much harder to force a split if the company loses the anti-trust case.