PayPal president David Marcus announces rebranding as mobile commerce competition heats up

PayPal president David Marcus has announced a major rebranding for the eBay-owned online payments company, as competition heats up in the mobile payments market.

The global rebranding campaign will see the company adopt a new logo and the slogan “powering the people economy”, with the company set to start advertising on Australian TV for the first time.

The ads, the first for the company, will also air in the US, the UK and Germany as part of a campaign developed by Havas Worldwide.

PayPal claims the rebrand will mean greater legibility and recognition. 

In a statement, Eden Zoller, principal analyst at analytics firm Ovum, says increased competition in the mobile commerce payments market prompted the rebranding.

“The challenge for PayPal’s mobile first ambition is that a multitude of other players have exactly the same goal for m-commerce, including Facebook. We also think Apple will make an explicit move into m-payments this year and the number of accounts that Apple has on file are substantially more than PayPal and just about everyone else,” Zoller says.

“Apple now has 800 million iTunes accounts and most of them are linked to credit cards. This compares to the 148 million active accounts for PayPal that parent eBay revealed in its Q1 2014 results this week.”

The campaign comes after eBay successfully fended off pressure from colourful investor Carl Icahn to spin off PayPal.

Last month, Icahn controversially attacked eBay director Marc Andreessen on US business news channel CNBC.

“In all the companies I’ve been in, I’ve never seen worse corporate governance than eBay,” he said.