Hai-Nhu Tran

Building brand strategy

Challenge

Meta’s metaverse had a branding challenge: variations of “Meta Horizon Worlds”, “Meta Horizon”, and “Meta Quest” were used interchangeably to refer to the app for experiencing the metaverse, the mixed reality headset operating system, and the headset itself. Internal confusion and inconsistency was reflected in the external consumer experience, inside and outside of the product, and was further exacerbated by additional metaverse features and products adopting a mix of the brands (e.g. Meta Quest Store, Horizon Feed).

To further complicate matters, in April 2024 the company announced the intention to rebrand “Meta Quest” to “Meta Horizon” as a social platform and an OS -- but not Meta’s headsets, which would remain “Meta Quest”. This decision was the forcing function to finally clarify and untangle the brand strategy for Meta's metaverse. The rebranding needed to be complete by September 2024, for the Meta Connect flagship event.

Goal

Improve consumer understanding of the metaverse's value propositions and build up brand equity. Define the “Meta Horizon” brand clearly, establish this brand as Meta’s consumer experience and OS for the metaverse across all devices (headsets and mobile), and differentiate it clearly from the Meta Quest brand (headset hardware only).

My role

I partnered with the Director of Product Marketing, Director of Brand, and a senior content designer to define the Meta Horizon brand positioning and value props, unwind and simplify branding decisions, and gain alignment with senior product leadership. I positioned the senior content designer to take the lead on defining key product concepts and mental models, which became foundational to the rebranding execution plan. I reviewed and contributed to the Meta Horizon go-to-market messaging toolkit (owned by Product Marketing) with clear product definitions, value props, messaging guidelines, and example uses.

With my leadership, the content design team partnered to define:

• Key concepts (with Brand)
• Value propositions (with Marketing)
• UX expression (with Product Design)
• Creative expression (with all Creative functions)
• Writing and naming guidance

Outcome

The content design team led the Metaverse org to complete a large-scale and comprehensive rebrand of Meta Quest to Meta Horizon quickly (within two quarters), in time for Meta Connect in September 2024. These changes spanned the end-to-end platform experience (in the go-to-market and in-product content) and across form factors (in headset and on mobile devices). The content design team provided clear guidelines to help multiple product teams locate and triage thousands of instances of “Meta Quest” and decide whether to rebrand, unbrand, or leave those instances unchanged.

Additional details

These images from public announcements of the rebrand illustrate the complexity of the naming and branding strategy, which needed to come across clearly in the user experience of the platform and products through intentional use (or removal) of brand names in the UI.