If there’s one thing Facebook does well, it’s muddying the waters.
It distributes an app which it claims helps people connect with the things they care about when really it listens in to your life to extract data to sell to advertisers.
It encourages you to share your photos while extracting irrevocable rights to use the pictures themselves and in doing so has created the biggest photo library in the world.
It claims it cares about privacy, yet hides permissions to share your private data deep within its terms and conditions.
Which of course you never, ever read, but you’ve agreed to this right?.
And in its latest announcement, it is now bringing clarity to its name.
Now that’s something two billion people never asked for. What about some clarity on fake news, or privacy concerns?
Does this ‘new brand system, designed for clarity‘ do that, or just it just muddy thy the waters some more?
Let’s have a look.
I think most business owners know that Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp.
But it believes people need to have more clarity on this, so they have given birth to a parent company. That’s muddy for a start.
So let me understand this, Facebook is pushing the boundaries of corporate size. It has a pretty scary grasp on the biggest social network brands, and it wants to remind people how big and scary it is by gathering all the kids together and saying, look at the size of my family!
Yip, it seems so, but more than that, the parent needs a name because until now, we’ve just known it it as Facebook, an app which we have to have in order for us to count our friends, and also a company behemoth that buys other companies like whales eat fish.
And that, they think is the problem we want them to solve.
But get this: the parent will be called FACEBOOK too! It’s not a typo, The parent company will also be called FACEBOOK.
That will be the difference between daddy and his first-born.
But in an important twist of typographical brand machismo, it will be in capitals. This is to appear masterful and grand, or in their words, to ‘create a visual distinction between the company and the app’. Do we actually care?
But fear not, because the Facebook brand designers who created the new logo for this new laboratorial brand-mammoth, have given it custom features, like a subtle curve on its K, a gentle rounding of the corners on its digits, and a bit of breathing space between the characters. Er, does that really differentiate it from little Facebook?
In case not, there’s more… because Daddy FACEBOOK will, unlike most other logos in the history of the world, be allowed the privilege of changing colours to match its environment. So there’ll be a whole rainbow of FACEBOOKs depending on which child you’re looking at.
I hope that’s all clear.