Shell Game

[bainsidhe]

I have never even seen a Blockbuster kiosk, but do you think they kept the name because of brand recognition? Redbox still isn't widely known in some areas, whereas folks may be more familiar with and accepting of the Blockbuster name.

[protege]

Redbox still isn't widely known in some areas, whereas folks may be more familiar with and accepting of the Blockbuster name.

Companies are sometimes hesitant to release 'new' things under 'new' names in some areas. Some people are simply used to names that have been around awhile. For example, when Datsuns became Nissans...American customers were a bit confused. To them, the Nissan name meant nothing. It took nearly a billion dollars and a massive ad campaign, rebranding, etc. before the name change took off.

Sometimes though, putting a new product under a familiar name can backfire--Cadillac Cimarron, anyone? At the time, GM wanted a smaller luxury car, so they tarted up a cheap Chevy Cavalier. Needless to say, traditional Cadillac customers weren't fooled. First-year sales were far below the projected amount...and it's been said that nearly a *quarter* of customers who had always bought Caddys...never bought another one. Instead, they turned to Japanese and European imports.

[Chromatix]

Here's an interesting one - Skoda. Having emerged from behind the Iron Curtain, they were for a while known only for particularly bad (by Western standards) cars - they would be mentioned in the same breath as Lada (whose cars are *still* awful).

These days however Skoda is owned by VW. They still have their factory in the Czech Republic, but instead of designing new cars, they take the tooling from VW's previous model, ship that to their factory, and make slight changes to the bodywork so that it doesn't quite look like a VW any more. And they put a Skoda badge on it.

The result is solidly engineered cars that, because the R&D work has already been paid off at VW, are relatively inexpensive. Parts are readily available for them too, because they are VWs underneath.

Anyway, that's really a classically benign example of market segmentation. There are less benign versions, such as selling the same product at different prices to different people, and then getting upset when someone bypasses their scheme by performing arbitrage.

[Ginger Tea]

The UK adverts played up the Skoda brand recognition aspects, guy on assembly line with the task of putting Skoda badges on lets dozzens go by and when his foreman asks what hes playing at he says (or it might have been a silent ad implies) that hes waiting for a Skoda to come down the line.

That was nearly a decade ago, I doubt they still play up to that old joke now.

Most car brands now are just names, bought and sold to other car manufacturers, they could have just bought the factories and designes and rebadged them as their own cars.
But as posted elsewhere (I think I might have also said it too) it gives the illusion of competition, if every ford owned company had thier cars rebranded as Ford (or are Ford one of the bought out names?) instead of having a few cars a year to choose from in the dealership you would have dozzens, yet you could whittle the list down to ford, ford owned company #1, ford owned company #2 etc and feel like you are shopping around instead of trying to think of which half a dozzen ford cars in your short list to choose from.

Some companies even make or buy out another brand just to have a cheap seats option, HP seemed to have done that to Compaq, not necessariily 'cheap seat' but sold to a different market.

[EricKei]

The GameStop at the local mall was originally Babbage's, eventually became Egghead (briefly) and then, eventually, GameStop...but the marquee still says Babbage's, as it has been there so long (well over 20 years, possibly as far back as the mall's founding) in the exact same spot that it's a major draw for mall traffic in general. AFAIK, the mall makes them maintain the old marquee as a condition of their lease o_O even tho all of their signage/promos/etc aside from the actual marquee say GameStop.

[Nekojin]

One of my childhood friends was the grandson of the founder of Oldsmobile. Sadly, Grandpa sold off the company, rather than making his descendants obscenely wealthy.

[HYHYBT]

One of my childhood friends was the grandson of the founder of Oldsmobile. Sadly, Grandpa sold off the company, rather than making his descendants obscenely wealthy.

Well, that depends on whether Oldsmobile would have thrived on its own if it hadn't become part of GM. Look how many carmakers there were in the first years of the 20th Century that were gone by WW!, and how many of the survivors were killed by the Great Depression, generally taking their owners' profits with them. The odds wouldn't have been in his favor.

[protege]

Well, that depends on whether Oldsmobile would have thrived on its own if it hadn't become part of GM. Look how many carmakers there were in the first years of the 20th Century that were gone by WW!, and how many of the survivors were killed by the Great Depression, generally taking their owners' profits with them. The odds wouldn't have been in his favor.

Oldsmobile would have probably ended up in GM sooner or later. GM gobbled up quite a few early automakers, and tended to do things on a grand scale. Smaller companies, like Hudson, Nash, Kaiser-Frazer (to name a few) simply couldn't compete. GM had huge factories and armies of engineers, not to mention huge reserves of cash to develop powerful V8s and other things that some of those smaller companies (Hudson, for one) could only dream of. Too bad, since some of those cars were pretty damn good!

[HYHYBT]

...and ending up there sooner meant the name stuck around a hundred years instead of ten or twenty. (I still wish it had stayed instead of Buick. Oldsmobile sounds classy; Buick sounds like the noise you make when you're sick to your stomach.)