You don’t own your brand architecture
Facebook’s recent rebrand to Meta is a handy case study in brand architecture- and a helpful reminder of who really owns a brand.
Facebook’s recent announcement changing the name of their company to Meta elicited reactions ranging from sycophantic to highly skeptical. While a promotional video with their founder Mark Zuckerberg praising their forthcoming ‘metaverse’ received a light-hearted parody courtesy of Iceland, the Facebook critics saw this rebrand as a PR campaign from a mendacious technological juggernaut under greater public scrutiny than ever. While that story continues to unfold and Facebook- I mean, Meta- brings their vision of the metaverse into focus, their rebrand provides a helpful example for understanding brand architecture.
In its simplest definition, brand architecture refers to the organizing structure of the brand or brands of your business- it defines how any brands, products and services in your company’s portfolio are related to, or distinct from, one another.
A common model for thinking about brand architecture is master or parent brand vs. individual or product brand paradigm - on one end of the spectrum is the master brand approach, where a company and most or all of its offerings are marketed and delivered on the basis of one cohesive corporate identity and positioning strategy. Google, FedEx and Microsoft are often-cited examples of master brand models, and this architecture strategy (yes, it should be intentional) makes it easier for a large complex enterprise with numerous related offerings to market them all more effectively at scale. For this reason, the master brand model is often referred to as a ‘branded house’ approach.
The opposite of the master brand model is an individual or product brand architecture, where instead of the parent company driving familiarity and awareness and loyalty for all it’s products in the market, the products themselves are the brands that buyers engage with, and these have no obvious association to the parent company. Proctor and Gamble, Nabisco and Unilever are all examples of individual/product brand strategies. This ‘house of brands’ approach has its own advantages, allowing a parent company to have a much more diverse portfolio of offerings across a greater variety of industries and markets, and accordingly requires robust distributed marketing capacity.
This is a gross oversimplification of brand architecture to illustrate the concepts; the reality is that it is more of a spectrum that most companies lie on, often in the middle but closer to one end or the other; but these well-defined examples represent the most distinct modes to which companies typically commit in their brand strategy.
Enter Facebook- in the beginning, there was only Facebook the platform and the product. Founder Mark Zuckerberg was the face of Facebook from the beginning, and even as Facebook exploded in popularity, growing to millions of users and billions in shareholder value, Facebook itself was indeed the master brand.
As Facebook continued to grow, going public in 2012, they began to diversify through acquisitions of platforms like Instagram, WhatsApp, Giphy and Oculus, where they sought to retain the independently-established brand equity of their acquired products, and effectively began to embrace a hybrid, ‘endorsed’ brand structure, similar to the Marriott example above.
In 2019, Facebook introduced a more corporate-looking minimalist logo to try and visually separate Facebook the parent company from Facebook the media platform.
The challenge, though, is that not only was Facebook the app synonymous with it’s creator Zuckerberg, but since he also continued as CEO and controlling shareholder of Facebook Inc., this made it hard to tell the difference between the parent company and the app product in the eyes of the public. And in recent years, as Facebook has come under criticism for issues relating to privacy, election-related disinformation and a general polarizing effect on society, Zuckerberg as the consistent face and voice of Facebook has been a lightning rod for much of the accusations leveled at the company. As I wrote in another article, highly visible leaders tend to personify a brand, for better and also for worse.
Now with the ‘Meta’ re-brand, they are effectively reconfiguring to make Meta the holding company with various platforms as the brands consumers engage with, of which Facebook is just one. The new name ostensibly refers to the parent company’s focus going forward on developing the nebulous ‘metaverse’, but it is nothing resembling a product that consumers are able to engage with yet. This is likely why many have criticized the rebrand as a PR campaign rather than a strategic business pivot. Indeed, what does it say about Facebook’s brand when the founder and mastermind of the platform himself is so eager to distance his company from it that he has to reposition his company around something completely different than what they are known for?
There is a fundamental risk in this rebrand, as Denise Lee Yohn clearly points out in this HBR article: a brand is among many things a promise, and if Facebook- I mean, Meta- is not changing their core business any time soon, and are still for all practical purposes a social media company with the Facebook app’s gargantuan advertising revenue fueling it, no one in the world will believe they are something new and different, especially when Mr. Facebook himself is still the face and the voice of the company. As the Meta’s own press release stated, “Our corporate structure is not changing, however, how we report on our financials will.”
It is often said that you don’t own your brand- your customers do- and the Facebook/Meta rebrand is a helpful illustration not just of an organization attempting to leverage brand architecture strategically, but also seemingly missing the fact that it is your customers who will ultimately decide what your brand- and your brand’s architecture- really is.
