It was also facing growing antitrust concerns over its advertising business.

In 2015, Google was facing increasing complaints from investors that its forays outside of its core search business, dubbed “moonshots,' weren't transparent enough. It changed its name to CVS Health in 2014 and stopped selling cigarettes in a bid to rebrand as a health-conscious company, not just a drugstore chain that makes money on prescriptions. The company now known as CVS Health had a long history of buying up pharmacy and retail chains to expand, and in 2006 bought pharmacy benefits manager Caremark and became CVS Caremark Corp. Netflix dropped the name a few months later. Coming on the heels of a price increase for customers who suddenly had to pay for two services instead of one, subscribers were in no mood to humor the whimsical name and lambasted it online. Netflix didn't rename the whole company Qwikster, but in 2011 it announced it was going to split into two services, with the online service we know today remaining Netflix, and the physical DVD rental service, known for its red envelopes, renamed Qwikster. But people still equated Altria with cigarettes, and Altria ended up spinning off Kraft in 2007 and refocusing on tobacco. Tobacco giant Philip Morris changed its name to Altria to try to focus the public perception more on the consumer food products it owned under the Kraft brand rather than tobacco. The timing of the rebranding was fortunate when Arthur Andersen became embroiled in the Enron financial scandal later in 2001. Friction with its parent led to a legal battle that concluded with Andersen Consulting not legally able to use the name Andersen, so it rebranded to Accenture.

Southwest Airlines bought AirTran in 2011 and AirTran flights ceased in 2014.Īndersen Consulting was a successful consulting spinoff from accounting firm Arthur Andersen. It acquired AirTran Airways in 1997 and took on the name of that airline. ValuJet was founded in 1992 as a low-cost airline, but a plane crash in 1996 with 110 fatalities left the brand tarnished. tried to rebrand as Tronc and was widely ridiculed.

It includes other growing businesses that aren't its namesake site, such as virtual reality hardware branch Oculus and Horizon Worlds, virtual reality software that's still in beta testing mode.Ī corporate rebranding strategy sometimes works - such as Andersen Consulting, which changed its name to Accenture - but sometimes fails - for example, when Tribune Co. The name of the Facebook app itself won't change, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the broader company will focus on the “metaverse,” a virtual computer-generated space where people can interact.

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