The “thumbs up” is down outside Facebook’s, ahem, Meta’s office complex at One Hacker Way in Menlo Park. The “thumbs up” was the old Facebook, the mark of its ubiquitous “Like” button that defined the original social network, but it has become a tarnished symbol.

In its place is a new logo that represents Meta, the next iteration of Facebook Inc. that banks on virtual reality and holograms to dominate computing within the next 10 years. The Meta sign uses the traditional Facebook blue hue, a nod to its past. The Meta logo is meant to be viewed in 3D, like a Mobius strip; it creates an infinite loop, and when viewed from the front it resembles an amorphous “M”—for Meta, not for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, according to the description of the design on a Facebook blog post about the changes.

Since the official rebrand was revealed on Thursday, it has become even clearer that Facebook is making a sweeping break from its prior self in becoming Meta. Now, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are brought to consumers from Meta, not from Facebook. Executive titles will now reflect their roles at Meta, not Facebook. The Facebook corporate Twitter account is now @meta.

And to fully distance the new “metaverse”-themed company from the social network’s name, Facebook Reality Labs is simply Reality Labs, the division that comprises most of the experimental projects that will come to comprise Meta’s metaverse. Also in the rebrand, Oculus Quest VR devices are called Meta Quest. Facebook’s Portal devices, the internet-connected communication screens, are called Meta Portals.

“It’s more than a change to a logo or a new tagline or a new color palette,” said Michelle Klein, VP of global consumer marketing at Meta, formerly Facebook, speaking during a phone interview this week. “It’s fundamental across the whole company and it really is signifying that new chapter, not just for the company that was Facebook, now Meta, but the future of social technology for people.”

Read: Facebook's corporate name is now Meta

There are few rebrands that garner as much attention as Facebook’s did. The company has 3.6 billion people using its apps monthly, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The apps came to define the mobile web, where people connect through phones for business, media and relationships. Facebook’s “Like” and share buttons became icons of the digital data economy built around the mobile web, affixed to millions of websites outside of Facebook. But they also became symbols of a potentially sinister side to Facebook—its surveillance side.

The typography at least will be familiar to some, because the font for “Meta” is the same one used on Facebook’s old corporate branding. And the same blue is used in the Meta infinity logo. Klein said the legacy of Facebook apps will remain.

“We’re not moving away for our origins and our roots,” Klein said.

Reactions to the rebrand

There are some who see Facebook’s rebrand into Meta as an abstraction and distraction from the current intrigue surrounding the powerful company. Facebook as a brand has been on a slide in the view of the public, as whistleblowers such as Frances Haugen have come forward with allegations that Zuckerberg and his team have mismanaged the company.

Facebook as a brand embodies the shortcomings of the current internet, where data and privacy lines have been broken, and the credibility of information and institutions have been tarnished. Fairly or not, Facebook has been blamed for weaponizing misinformation in ways that frayed social cohesion, impeding fair elections and public safety, including spreading COVID-19 conspiracies. These are issues that won’t neatly fade away in a rebrand.

“The biggest issue Facebook faces is a lack of consumer trust that it has a greater purpose,” said John Weiss, co-founder and partner at creative agency Human Design. “And rebranding as Meta does nothing but serve to reinforce consumers' fears that Facebook is only concerned about itself. Every service they mention under this new umbrella brand has more to do with services focused on entertainment that would seemingly disconnect humans from reality even more than it would to solve the real-world concerns consumers have with the brand."

Not everyone was impressed with the rebrand, the redesigned logo or the overall presentation of Facebook morphing into Meta.

"I think the rebrand is unfortunately poorly planned, executed and branded. The logo is generic, and the concept of the infinity symbol feels first-generation, like an early idea we'd typically omit before sharing with a client,” said Mario Natarelli, managing partner at brand consulting firm MBLM. “The name is fine, but the typography is plain and unremarkable. As a corporate entity that sits above the consumer-facing apps, the name and logo are innocuous though still unbefitting a trillion-dollar company."

Chris Ross, a Gartner branding, innovation and technology analyst, said Facebook's rebrand would face scrutiny no matter what the company chose to do. “With any rebranding, the name, the new company, the color palette, the typography, the voice, all of that is going to be under the microscope.”

Read: Brands react to Facebook's name change on Twitter

Zuckerberg's motivations

In an interview this week with the tech blog Stratechery, Zuckerberg identified one of the motivations for the rebrand was Facebook’s relationship with Oculus. Oculus, now Quest, is one of Facebook’s most high-profile products for the metaverse, where it competes with gaming companies like Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox to build a head-set enabled virtual world. As Facebook’s social media users grow older, the company needs to appeal to the youth that will inhabit the metaverse. The Facebook brand was a hindrance. In 2020, Oculus gamers rebelled when Facebook made the VR devices rely on Facebook login accounts to access.

“In terms of the experience having people sign into Quest with Facebook, it’s not the direction we’re going to go in going forward,” Zuckerberg told Stratechery’s Ben Thompson. “The feedback that we got on that was one of the things that made me actually feel a sense of urgency that we did need to make it so that people had a different brand relationship with the overall company than the Facebook app.”

What the rebrand means for the company's future 

The rebrand came under the direction of Chief Marketing Officer Alex Schultz, who joined the company in 2007 and rose to the head marketing spot last year. The name, logo and wordmark for Meta were developed by an internal design team, with the help of a few external partners, according to a Facebook spokesperson. Facebook declined to name the outside firms involved.

Klein said that she played a small part in the team that helped develop the rebranding strategy. “It really does paint this dynamic picture of what the future can be,” Klein said.

To convey a 3D environment, the Meta logo is designed to be seen in a 360-view. Klein envisions that wine-makers could one day take customers on virtual tours of  Napa Valley. Klein also said brands like Sephora already dabbled in the metaverse. During the COVID-19 lockdown, Sephora used popular creators on Instagram to promote new fragrances that couldn’t be tested in stores. The ads incorporated filters with shapes and colors that conveyed the scent of its Do Not Drink line of fragrances.

Thursday’s presentation of the rebrand mostly showed what might be possible within 10 years after Meta’s promised $90 billion splurge to invest in new VR and AR products. And to be clear, Meta’s new full corporate name is Meta Platforms Inc., according to the company's Oct. 28 filings with U.S. regulators.

Zuckerberg envisions a metaverse economy that brings 1 billion people into the internet and runs a gross domestic product in the hundreds of billions of dollars; based on creators developing paid digital experiences; gaming companies building new worlds; transactions from non-fungible token (NFT) marketplaces; and infinite varieties of virtual goods, including everything from clothes to concert tickets.

One of Klein’s jobs will be to explain what Meta means for the 10 million-plus advertisers that generated nearly $85 billion in ad revenue for the company formerly known as Facebook Inc. in 2020. The metaverse looks bright but it seems far off for mom-and-pop shops on Main Street that make up the bulk of Facebook’s revenue.

“There are steps for businesses to get involved now,” Klein said. “Like stickers and filters are really easy and then there’s obviously the greater leap, which is where businesses will go more into a 3D environment.”