This week brought news from WeWork, the co-working unicorn, that it has decided to downgrade its main business to a mere subsidiary. WeWork has a famously complex corporate structure, but lift your eyes above the newly demoted WeWork to the very apex and behold — The We. (I am not making this up.) The big picture: WeWork is not the only company to demote its flagship brand and name the holding company something silly, or worse. Historically, companies were proud to name themselves after brands they had managed to elevate to a place of global name recognition. If you had a weird non-brand name like Gulf & Western or MacAndrews & Forbes, that was a sign that you were mostly in the business of buying and selling companies — that ultimately you weren't committed to your brands. The bottom line: This kind of move is generally presented as a way of telegraphing ambitions much greater than owning a single consumer-facing brand, no matter how successful that product might be. But it often comes across as a signifier of ambivalence and shame. In some ways, it's the modern-day equivalent of the rentier distancing himself from his coal mines. Go deeper: How to name your startup
US co-working firm WeWork has downgraded its core business to a subsidiary of its overarching company, now re-marketed under the name The We Company. This decision follows a Silicon Valley trend of "de-branding". Google became part of its parent company Alphabet, while Snapchat now comes under the umbrella corporation of Snap. The vogue of separating the consumer-facing brand from the investment-focused company is a suggestion that the corporate leadership aims to diversify into a number of different industries. Moreover, this distancing can sometimes be construed as an ownership trying to disassociate themselves from a problematic, or perhaps shameful, label.