• Paragone@lemmy.world
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    9 hours ago

    The other answers here are important.

    But there’s an angle that people apparently aren’t noticing?

    The urge to make the brand cover more & more & more…

    Outside of a Keiretsu ( a Japanese business-structure where a brand/name like Panasonic has 30…300 companies in it, where each company is essentially an “organ” within the organism…

    Toyota is a vertical keiretsu, Panasonic & Sony are horizontal keiretsu.

    Horizontal keiretsu get into everything.

    Want solar-cells? Panasonic makes 'em.

    Want electronic-components? Panasonic.

    ttbomk, they make mining-trucks & industrial-robots.

    EVERYthing.

    They are a semi-autonomous economy, & that is the actual intent.

    Complete supply-chain. )

    outside of a keiretsu, nearly every time any company tries to spread the brand onto other products/services, it dilutes or obliterates the brand.

    It’s an apparently-irresistable urge, though…

    Coca-Cola is focused, but Pepsi owns Frito-Lay, restaurant-chains, pop, etc…

    So, ,Coca-Cola can go to restaurants & say “Pepsico is competing against you … do you want to be buying anything from them??” & that’ll work to turn the restaurant to Coca-Cola.

    The book “Focus” by Al Ries is on this stuff.

    GM had a bunch of brands, such that each brand “Pontiac”, “Buick”, whatever, had its own specific niche in the market…

    Then they obliterated that…

    A Cadillac-loyal guy showed me a Cadillac brochure he got sent: it told him to by a Chevrolet e-vehicle.

    Brand-violation.

    Cadillac lost immense credibility in doing that ad-campaign.


    Anyways, it’s a fundamental market-fact that you have to have each brand be in-focus, & Reis’ book “The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding” is on how the market is going to deal-with you.

    Remember Borland? ( you probably don’t )

    They made software-compilers for Windows, last century…

    Microsoft was squeezing them out of existence…

    They tried rebranding, as “Inprise” … & lost marketshare faster than they ever had, before…

    They changed their name back to Borland… & died more slowly.

    The market decides what your brand means.

    IF you decide on “brand extention” THEN you have communicated to the market that you don’t matter anymore, because you have no focus

    AND…

    The urge to do a “brand extension” is sooo fundamental, that it’s apparently irresistable for corporate-executives??


    I’d outright fire anybody who tried brand-extension, in any company I was running: READ the books by Al Ries ( & Jack Trout, & Laura Ries ), & UNDERSTAND & LIVE-BY those meanings.

    Company-survival isn’t mere-pretend!

    Amazon did it successfully, because it had no competitor ( changing from books-only to everything ).

    But … nearly nobody survives such idiocy.

    Microsoft … there’s a book “A New Brand World”, don’t remember the author … it recounts a PR company who’d been hired by Microsoft … the Microsoft culture was destroying them. That contract was their most-lucrative-contract, by far.

    The CEO of that company, one day, sent around to all-hands an email which stated only:

    “Ding dong. The wicked witch is dead.”

    EVERYbody knew that it meant he’d killed the contract, in order to save their company’s soul.

    Toxic-culture isn’t just male-culture in many places, or some family-cultures, it can be corporate-culture, too, right?

    Steve Ballmer is part of Microsoft history, of the period you’re identifying…

    He was much of the problem, from what I can see… bullying was his … thing, from the things that Microsoft got famous-for, in TheInquirer.net , & TheRegister.com back in those days…

    Most of that journalism is wiped from the internet, nowadays…

    Charlie Demerjian also did much on them, through the years… ( www.SemiAccurate.com is his current site, iirc )

    Ego, especially unconscious ego, is the most-lethal “strategy” one can obey.

    Brand-extention is an ego-masturbation.

    Every specific domain ought have its-own brand!

    Unless one is a keiretsu.

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