Düsseldorf, New York On Thursday it should be so far: Then the social media group Facebook is expected to reveal the secret and announce its new name. Meta, Metaverse, Horizon, Face – these are just a few of the names that have been speculated about. In any case, a name change would have a signal effect – and the intention to convey a certain message: Facebook stands for more than just its aging social network that has come under criticism.
Facebook wouldn’t be the first company to rename itself. Other large companies have also changed their names in recent years – in the USA as well as in Germany. Prominent examples are Google, Philip Morris and Karstadt. In most cases, the companies wanted to save their ailing reputation or to distance themselves from certain products.
Philip Davis, founder and president of the branding agency Tungsten Branding, gives four reasons for company renaming: when the old name refers to a product that is no longer up-to-date, when the name is misleading, when there is a trademark lawsuit or when there has been negative headlines and the company needs a fresh start.
“In the case of Facebook, the main purpose of the new name is apparently to enable it to move in a new direction, in a broader field than just social media and messaging,” explains Davis. Whether Apple, Microsoft or Google, all of the big tech companies wanted to create ecosystems in which they could exert greater influence.
Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.
“Even against the background of the recently rather negative perception, the new name could hardly come at a better time,” says Davis. But a new name alone could not save the reputation, warns the brand expert. The change must also be lived. The following is an overview of the most prominent name changes in the corporate world from the past three decades:
1. Google> Alphabet
Google surprisingly changed its parent company’s name to Alphabet in October 2015. Today, Google only bears the actual search engine business, while other areas such as Fitbit or Waymo in the tech conglomerate operate under the umbrella of Alphabet.
As co-founder Larry Page explained the choice of the name, “We liked the name Alphabet because it stands for a collection of letters that represent language – one of humanity’s most important innovations and the core of how we index our Google searches “. In addition, “Alpha” stands for an investment return that is above the market average – and that is what we want to achieve. The former CEO Eric Schmidt told three years ago that the real inspiration came from Hamburg: Google has an office there on ABC-Straße.
2. Philip Morris> Altria
The US tobacco company Philip Morris changed its name to Altria in 2003. The move followed the multi-billion dollar lawsuits against the Marlboro maker who downplayed the health risks of smoking. With the new name, the company should no longer be so strongly associated with cigarettes. After all, at that time the group still owned the majority of the food manufacturer Kraft. However, Altria sold all of these shares in 2007. Today Altria produces almost exclusively cigarettes. But you can’t tell right away from the name.
3. Andersen Consulting> Accenture
On January 1, 2001, the consulting firm Andersen Consulting changed its name to Accenture. In retrospect, it was a clever move. Finally, the auditing firm Arthur Andersen, which was previously connected to the consultancy, ran into trouble shortly afterwards in the wake of the Enron scandal. Arthur Andersen’s auditors had not noticed or hidden air bookings in the hundreds of billions. This sealed the end of the energy company. So Accenture was lucky not to have “Andersen” in its name anymore.
4. Karstadt source> Arcandor
In 2007, the then CEO Thomas Middelhoff gave the ailing stock exchange company Karstadt-Quelle the art name Arcandor. Karstadt-Quelle, for a long time a member of the Dax, had previously frightened its shareholders with a drop in sales and loss-making business.
In November 2014, Thomas Middelhoff was sentenced to three years in prison by the Essen regional court for embezzlement and tax evasion. After his application for a revision was rejected, he began his prison sentence in the JVA Bielefeld and, at his own request, worked as an outdoor worker as a temporary worker with disabled people.
(Photo: dpa)
Middelhoff therefore hoped to remedy the situation by strengthening the tourism division through acquisitions, which he forged around the subsidiary Thomas Cook. The new name, so the intention, should put the close dependency on the ailing department store and mail order catalog business in the background. The plan failed. Arcandor went bankrupt in 2009, followed a few years later by Thomas Cook.
5. Blackwater> Academi
The military company Blackwater, founded in 1996, specializes in the services of so-called “contractors”. These are paid private soldiers who are also deployed abroad for the US government. Blackwater had come under international criticism for killing 17 civilians and injuring 20 others in Baghdad in 2007. Two years later, the company was renamed Xe Services and in 2011 Academi.
6. Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz> Novartis
When the two Swiss chemical and pharmaceutical companies Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz merged in 1996, it quickly became clear that a neutral artificial name had to be found for the new structure – they agreed on Novartis. That was not only because the two conglomerates wanted to create a pure drug manufacturer and thus something new. The company name Sandoz was also eliminated because back then it was still associated with a catastrophic chemical accident.
In 1985 a huge Sandoz warehouse burned down in Basel. A cloud of poisonous smoke moved over the city, and the fire-fighting water carried toxic chemicals into the Rhine, causing fish to die and coloring the river red for hundreds of kilometers. Novartis only reactivated Sandoz in 2003 and merged the business with over-the-counter medicines under the old name. Sandoz is still a division of Novartis today.
7. Metal company> Gea
Often it is subsidiaries that have been acquired recently that have to give their names to the parent company to be renamed. This is also the case in the case of the former Bochum and now Düsseldorf mechanical engineering company Gea, behind which the former metal company is hidden. The group, which was founded in the 19th century, was already criticized for its dubious interrelationships before the First World War. Lenin called it a prototype of monopoly capitalism. In 1993 it slipped into the negative headlines again – this time for a different reason: The then CEO Heinz Schimmelbusch had gambled away the group’s assets through loss-making oil futures, which made a spectacular rescue operation by the banks necessary. The company then renamed itself MG Technologies, since 2005 it has been called Gea – named after an acquired subsidiary.
8. Preussag> Tui
Preussag held it similarly: The traditional heavy industry group saw no future in its traditional business at the end of the 1990s, bought a portfolio from the tourism industry and finally renamed itself Tui in 2002.
9. AWD> Swiss Life Select
In many cases, companies change their names in order to shed an old and, above all, damaged image. In 2013, for example, the name of the financial advisor AWD disappeared from the scene. The company, founded by Carsten Maschmeyer in 1987, was in the negative headlines in previous years due to a large wave of customer complaints.
Today, the AWD founder is best known as an investor on the Vox TV show “Die Höhle der Löwen”.
(Photo: dpa)
A few years after taking over the structural distribution, the new owner Swiss Life deleted the name, which has since operated as Swiss Life Select.
10. Foodora> Foodpanda
Most German townspeople still remember the large pink rucksacks used by the Foodora drivers. The company was founded in 2014 and was part of Delivery Hero, one of the largest online ordering platforms, which is now also represented in the Dax. But reports of poor working conditions for the food couriers scratched the company’s reputation.
In 2018 Delivery Hero sold its delivery businesses such as Pizza.de, Lieferheld and also Foodora to Takeaway.com, its rival in the Netherlands. In Germany and Austria, the pink drivers disappeared from the streets – and only reappeared as delivery drivers dressed in orange under the now well-known name Lieferando. The color pink recently came back: Delivery Hero started a new delivery service in Germany called Foodpanda – the writing on the logo is almost completely identical to the word “Foodora”.
More: Facebook boss Zuckerberg goes over to the counterattack – and sees himself as a victim of the media