5 ms·

I've been thinking of late that we need to add some sort of five year sunset rule about brands and acquisitions to antitrust laws. So after an acquisition the b

I've been thinking of late that we need to add some sort of five year sunset rule about brands and acquisitions to antitrust laws. So after an acquisition the buyer has a couple of years before they have to stop using the acquired companies name and brand.

extraduder_ire 3y ago
Wouldn't that just lead to the brands themselves being sold off or licensed? Or, if such things were prevented somehow, many sorts of things being terribly confusing. Like, needing to go down to the "Yum! Brands" to get take-out, no not the pizza one, the chicken one. Other chicken one. Reverse-mergers would be a nightmare too.
WorldMaker 3y ago
There used to be advertising transparency laws that advertised products had to mention the parent company of a brand. These days you mostly see it voluntarily done when a company is afraid to sunset an ancient brand with good history but also wants their brand noticed and associated (things like "Columbia Pictures, a Sony Corporation"), but some of those sorts of disclosures in the past were required for certain forms of advertisement (even if just in fine print) and maybe it is time to go back to enforcing that sort of thing. There is the "Lenovo strategy", where some of the companies do sunset the original brands once licenses become too expensive and they've established their own brand. Lenovo went from "IBM ThinkPad by Lenovo" to "Lenovo ThinkPad" over a relatively few years. I'm still curious if, among others, "GE Appliances, a Haier Company" is a short-term play of this sort with the end goal to drop the "GE Appliances" name and logo in a few years or if Haier is less confident in their own brand and will stick with the mouthful (and GE licenses) long term. (The other example of Sony would probably be too much for American consumers if they killed Columbia and/or TriStar brands. There's a deep-seated stickiness to the old Hollywood studio brands. Amazon seems to have learned this lesson real quick post-MGM acquisition and backpedaled quite fast on dropping MGM branded stuff for the Amazon Studios brand. They've even backpedaled so hard that they resurrected the Orion brand decades after MGM mostly let it retire. It weirdly blew my mind seeing an Orion Pictures logo on a 2023 trailer for an upcoming film.) (Though today with tools like Wikipedia more information of that sort is "easily" researchable than ever before. But truth in advertising laws have always said it is better to save the advertising reader/viewer the research work than to trust people will do the research.)

extraduder_ire 3y ago

Wouldn't that just lead to the brands themselves being sold off or licensed? Or, if such things were prevented somehow, many sorts of things being terribly confusing. Like, needing to go down to the "Yum! Brands" to get take-out, no not the pizza one, the chicken one. Other chicken one. Reverse-mergers would be a nightmare too.

WorldMaker 3y ago

There used to be advertising transparency laws that advertised products had to mention the parent company of a brand. These days you mostly see it voluntarily done when a company is afraid to sunset an ancient brand with good history but also wants their brand noticed and associated (things like "Columbia Pictures, a Sony Corporation"), but some of those sorts of disclosures in the past were required for certain forms of advertisement (even if just in fine print) and maybe it is time to go back to enforcing that sort of thing. There is the "Lenovo strategy", where some of the companies do sunset the original brands once licenses become too expensive and they've established their own brand. Lenovo went from "IBM ThinkPad by Lenovo" to "Lenovo ThinkPad" over a relatively few years. I'm still curious if, among others, "GE Appliances, a Haier Company" is a short-term play of this sort with the end goal to drop the "GE Appliances" name and logo in a few years or if Haier is less confident in their own brand and will stick with the mouthful (and GE licenses) long term. (The other example of Sony would probably be too much for American consumers if they killed Columbia and/or TriStar brands. There's a deep-seated stickiness to the old Hollywood studio brands. Amazon seems to have learned this lesson real quick post-MGM acquisition and backpedaled quite fast on dropping MGM branded stuff for the Amazon Studios brand. They've even backpedaled so hard that they resurrected the Orion brand decades after MGM mostly let it retire. It weirdly blew my mind seeing an Orion Pictures logo on a 2023 trailer for an upcoming film.) (Though today with tools like Wikipedia more information of that sort is "easily" researchable than ever before. But truth in advertising laws have always said it is better to save the advertising reader/viewer the research work than to trust people will do the research.)