No the problem is that information isn't free and cannot be free. Branding can provide short hand information to make that information easier to digest.
In situations where research is expected to be done it doesn't cause a problem
In situations where information is naturally high it doesn't cause a problem
In situations where information is naturally low it "does" cause a problem and does is in quotes because I am asserting its the low information and not the branding that causes the problem.
That is, if we got rid of brands you would not be better off in those low information situations. You'd be just as fucked. But you would have more information costs in situations where information is naturally high (because you, presumably, don't starve and also buy your own food)
But you're saying "information" as though all "information" is equivalent. Branding provides short hand information that the corporations want you to digest. I'm saying that there is other information out there that they don't want you to digest, and that branding may even obfuscate that information.
No, information is not free, but as established, the cost of the information the corporations want you to have is free and the cost of the information that I, or others, might want you to have is not, and I don't know why that's just a-okay as the tradeoff, why, in a world where information isn't free, theirs get through and not others', and why that can't be critiqued. Why do they get to control the flow of information? And is it actually good for us that they do? Maybe consumers should have to do research into the many different variants of Con-Agra Glutino products and not into the fact that all these products are all Con-Agra? Why one and not the other, besides that the one makes Con-Agra more money and the other does not?
Hell, wouldn't slapping the parent corporation onto every brand itself be a trivial way of adding more information in a way that doesn't make anything worse? Frito-Lay's Fritos. Frito-Lay's Doritos. Frito-Lay's Ruffles. What's wrong with this model? (Other than that it should be Pepsico, but whatever.)
The brand is a name that goes on a product. It doesn’t mean that the information is “what they want you to have” the information is whatever is associated with that brand, good or bad. This from personal experience, product reviews, journalism, etc
Fritos, doritos, and ruffles are brands. You claim to want to do away with that. Adding parent companies to products would be fine. But I really don’t think it’s going to solve what you think it solves.
Fritos, doritos, and ruffles are all tagged with the frito lay branding. We know those are all made by the same people because they tell us they are.
What you might not get is that those are all Pepsi products
As are aunt jemima maple syrup, captain crunch, and sabra hummus, as well as a host of other products
Right, but that's the point. If there is even a problem here, it's that all those brands are owned by one corporation. The existence of those separate brands is fine and actually conveys information to the consumer about the product they are purchasing.
No that's the problem is they obfuscate that it's all part of the same corporate shed. They all follow the same rules. If i have a problem with Pepsi co, but don't realize that sabra is pepsico hunmus then im not able to properly inform my purchase
Inform your purchase in what sense?
Knowing who's product I'm buying
What is the relevance? Is the product different somehow?
If tomorrow the CEO of PepsiCo said “10% of all of our profits from now on are going to this charity for Nazi pedophiles” you would want to know which products to avoid without having to spend an afternoon on Google looking it up
Hell, wouldn't slapping the parent corporation onto every brand itself be a trivial way of adding more information in a way that doesn't make anything worse? Frito-Lay's Fritos. Frito-Lay's Doritos. Frito-Lay's Ruffles. What's wrong with this model? (Other than that it should be Pepsico, but whatever.)
You know Frito-Lay already does that, right? Check out the back of a Doritos bag.
Hell, wouldn't slapping the parent corporation onto every brand itself be a trivial way of adding more information in a way that doesn't make anything worse? Frito-Lay's Fritos. Frito-Lay's Doritos. Frito-Lay's Ruffles. What's wrong with this model? (Other than that it should be Pepsico, but whatever.)
You know Frito-Lay already does that, right? Check out the back of a Doritos bag.
Hell, wouldn't slapping the parent corporation onto every brand itself be a trivial way of adding more information in a way that doesn't make anything worse? Frito-Lay's Fritos. Frito-Lay's Doritos. Frito-Lay's Ruffles. What's wrong with this model? (Other than that it should be Pepsico, but whatever.)
You know Frito-Lay already does that, right? Check out the back of a Doritos bag.
Frito-Lay is not the global ultimate owner/parent company. That's PepsiCo.
If they wanted to obfuscate it, they wouldn't have it on the bag at all. It's not like they're required to have it.
I can understand not branding it Pepsi, because in consumer minds (myself included) Pepsi is a different product and market. I might buy Pepsi and Doritos, but "Nacho Cheese Pepsi Chips" sounds gross.
If they wanted to obfuscate it, they wouldn't have it on the bag at all. It's not like they're required to have it.
I can understand not branding it Pepsi, because in consumer minds (myself included) Pepsi is a different product and market. I might buy Pepsi and Doritos, but "Nacho Cheese Pepsi Chips" sounds gross.
Could be worse.
Nacho Cheese Pepsi Cola is the more disgusting option.
Premium products cannot be differentiated in price and quality if they have the same brand as the base product. How would you tell them apart? Inspect everything you bought for quality?
What is the difference between Glutino and Udi's? Smart balance and Earth balance? What information does the consumer gain by seeing jiffy pop and redenbacher next to each other?
What is the difference between Glutino and Udi's assuming they're owned by different companies?
But that was not actually the question asked. It was how do you differentiate premium products if you're not allowed to brand them differently? So you have Jiffy Pop and Jiffy Pop. One is priced more. How do you tell the difference in quality?
Branding isn't perfect, but you can research Glutino and Udi's and its precisely the same as you being able to research "Con Agra Glutin Free formulation one" versus ", "con agra gluten free formulation two" or "con agra regular formulation one". Not having a "brand" there is, at the very least, not value positive.
As an example in food. Saratasso makes a gluten free 4 cheeze pizza shell. Its fucking amazing. The company that owns Saratasso also owns well, basically all of the other frozen pizzas. Saratasso's pizza shell is the one i like the most. If that company (which can clearly make good Pizza's since i like one of them) cannot brand differently then i cannot tell whether or not the shell i am getting is the shitty Red Baron or the great Saratasso. I can get things in the same style of Saratasso by purchasing other Saratasso products. When i go to the market i can just like... check and see at a glance if they have the shells i want. I don't need to check three semi-identical boxes to make sure they have the gluten free pizza shell that doesn't suck.
Brands become short hand for the information we retain about them. If Glutino is made with cauliflower and Udi's is made with rice, i can check the label and no that without having to check ingredients each time or having every product be named the same thing. That actually has value, so long as the products are actually different.
The problems you're all describing here doesn't come from the fact that there are different brands. The problems you're describing come strictly from consolidation. If those brands were all made one brand, if Udi's went away and Glutino was the only one left you would not be better off (you might even be worse off if the different branding made it easier for conagra to differentiate between varying types of gluten free products, because now you would have to do additional research to determine which of the glutino products you wanted, and this might even take up additional mind space)
The biggest problems largely come in situations where you either
A) don't do a lot of research because the cost is low Don't do a lot of repeat business because the frequency is low
C) The research itself is obfuscated because the information does not exist to know that products are the same
Most people when buying a car don't have problems with brands, they're spending thousands of dollars and are taking the time to figure things out. They can determine which companies make which cars (its not even obfuscated!)
Most people when buying food buy food consistently, and so can try out and find different brands that they like and those that they don't.
Most people when buying appliances don't do a lot of research because its not that expensive and you don't need one very often (unless it breaks) or their appliances are primarily purchased by a third party on their behalf (apartments, pre-installed in the home when you get there etc). And they don't buy loads so they don't retain information about how they performed and...
And the problems aren't caused by the fact that its brands, brands seem to be working OK in food and cars. The problem seems to be caused by agency problems and raw information obfuscation.
This seems incredibly backwards to me. "So look, if consumers do all this research, they can eventually penetrate what's going on and figure shit out," doesn't seem like a great, or even adequate response to, "Hey, maybe we shouldn't make shit so hard to figure out." It rings of the whole, "Look, we should be allowed to sell predatory financial products to consumers, so long as we harp on about how important financial literacy is, and if only consumers had financial literacy, they wouldn't buy our predatory financial products." Ummmm?
I'm also suuuper-doubtful this is actually working "OK" as you claim, so much as that we don't have any hard evidence that it's not working okay, because such evidence would be very hard to come by. We've literally had posters here, people who are big research-nerds and, I'd contend, significantly smarter than the average population tuning into a thread about this issue, openly admit that they didn't know something about car brands or that some consumer products are actually the same but branded differently.
There's also a lot of evidence in the research about the effect of brands on consumer behaviour, that you can extract additional revenue by slapping a brand onto a product, that by telling someone a certain product is by a certain brand, we can alter how much they like the product; surely those are "harmful" generally, if only because these are introducing market inefficiencies and encouraging distortive behaviours. And we can still dive further into the democratic/societal effects: if Glutino was the only product on the market, whether as a single brand or as a multi-branded product, we, as citizens, should fucking know about it! It should be obvious and plain! If people want to boycott Frito-Lays, nobody should be fooled into buying Doritos! If there's one corporation that's solely contributing to making teenagers obese and unhealthy via junk-food, that's an important fact for society to know, whether you're a consumer of those products or not, and I don't know why that fact should only be knowable after we've done some arbitrary amount of research, as determined by... who, exactly? Why shouldn't all facts be plain and obvious to all? Why should certain facts be hidden behind research-walls?
Humans are not purely rational. If certain brands have ephemeral value in prestige or social signaling or nostalgia or emotional response I don't see why those are any less legitimate than material differences.
Because we assume a rational market and preying on emotional responses undermines the assumption. You're encouraging irrational decision making.
Premium products cannot be differentiated in price and quality if they have the same brand as the base product. How would you tell them apart? Inspect everything you bought for quality?
What is the difference between Glutino and Udi's? Smart balance and Earth balance? What information does the consumer gain by seeing jiffy pop and redenbacher next to each other?
What is the difference between Glutino and Udi's assuming they're owned by different companies?
But that was not actually the question asked. It was how do you differentiate premium products if you're not allowed to brand them differently? So you have Jiffy Pop and Jiffy Pop. One is priced more. How do you tell the difference in quality?
Branding isn't perfect, but you can research Glutino and Udi's and its precisely the same as you being able to research "Con Agra Glutin Free formulation one" versus ", "con agra gluten free formulation two" or "con agra regular formulation one". Not having a "brand" there is, at the very least, not value positive.
As an example in food. Saratasso makes a gluten free 4 cheeze pizza shell. Its fucking amazing. The company that owns Saratasso also owns well, basically all of the other frozen pizzas. Saratasso's pizza shell is the one i like the most. If that company (which can clearly make good Pizza's since i like one of them) cannot brand differently then i cannot tell whether or not the shell i am getting is the shitty Red Baron or the great Saratasso. I can get things in the same style of Saratasso by purchasing other Saratasso products. When i go to the market i can just like... check and see at a glance if they have the shells i want. I don't need to check three semi-identical boxes to make sure they have the gluten free pizza shell that doesn't suck.
Brands become short hand for the information we retain about them. If Glutino is made with cauliflower and Udi's is made with rice, i can check the label and no that without having to check ingredients each time or having every product be named the same thing. That actually has value, so long as the products are actually different.
The problems you're all describing here doesn't come from the fact that there are different brands. The problems you're describing come strictly from consolidation. If those brands were all made one brand, if Udi's went away and Glutino was the only one left you would not be better off (you might even be worse off if the different branding made it easier for conagra to differentiate between varying types of gluten free products, because now you would have to do additional research to determine which of the glutino products you wanted, and this might even take up additional mind space)
The biggest problems largely come in situations where you either
A) don't do a lot of research because the cost is low Don't do a lot of repeat business because the frequency is low
C) The research itself is obfuscated because the information does not exist to know that products are the same
Most people when buying a car don't have problems with brands, they're spending thousands of dollars and are taking the time to figure things out. They can determine which companies make which cars (its not even obfuscated!)
Most people when buying food buy food consistently, and so can try out and find different brands that they like and those that they don't.
Most people when buying appliances don't do a lot of research because its not that expensive and you don't need one very often (unless it breaks) or their appliances are primarily purchased by a third party on their behalf (apartments, pre-installed in the home when you get there etc). And they don't buy loads so they don't retain information about how they performed and...
And the problems aren't caused by the fact that its brands, brands seem to be working OK in food and cars. The problem seems to be caused by agency problems and raw information obfuscation.
Brands are being used to obfuscate raw information with examples given in this thread of how a premium can be charged for the same product just by addition of a brand and many concrete examples of monopolistic practices being hidden behind branding.
Brands are a tool used by corporations to control information flow to the public for the benefit of the corporation.
We also have examples where brands provide information. I've had Aldi/Meijer/Kroger/etc "cream filled chocolate cookies," and I've had Oreos. Oreos taste better, full stop. Not only will I pay more money for Oreo brand cookies, if Oreos are out of stock I won't buy the alternative cookies at all.
There's plenty of problems with giant conglomerate mega corps, but I don't think the problem is that they're not slapping the parent company logo in 72PT font on every box.
The only problem I see with obfuscated brands is that it obscures monopolies.
Which again is a problem of lack of regulation. Placing the onus on consumers to reject certain products from unregulated monopolies isn't fair. People have bills to pay and mouths to feed.
I'm really curious, what would some of you that are so against branding actually want to see as the end result? Maybe this morning's coffee just hasn't kicked in, but I honestly can't even think of a scenario that is meaningfully different from just requiring that a parent company/ultimate owner's name be included on the packaging.
Because again, you're going to have to differentiate your product's name somehow so your consumers can identify it, and whatever that is would just become the de facto new brand.
I'm really curious, what would some of you that are so against branding actually want to see as the end result? Maybe this morning's coffee just hasn't kicked in, but I honestly can't even think of a scenario that is meaningfully different from just requiring that a parent company/ultimate owner's name be included on the packaging.
Because again, you're going to have to differentiate your product's name somehow so your consumers can identify it, and whatever that is would just become the de facto new brand.
One of the reasons so many car dealerships have the owners name on the sign is that there are state regulations requiring that the owner must identify themselves to the customer. I could see a similar thing in the larger market - you can call it whatever you like under whatever brand name you like, but the umbrella company must still have its logo and name prominently displayed on the packaging.
If this leads customers to wonder why the same company is selling 4/5 of the products on the shelf and influences their choose accordingly, even if it is just picking the cheapest one after deciding they are "all the same", then so much the better. This would also make it a lot easier to swear off, say, a company that keeps getting hit with safety recalls.
No the problem is that information isn't free and cannot be free. Branding can provide short hand information to make that information easier to digest.
In situations where research is expected to be done it doesn't cause a problem
In situations where information is naturally high it doesn't cause a problem
In situations where information is naturally low it "does" cause a problem and does is in quotes because I am asserting its the low information and not the branding that causes the problem.
That is, if we got rid of brands you would not be better off in those low information situations. You'd be just as fucked. But you would have more information costs in situations where information is naturally high (because you, presumably, don't starve and also buy your own food)
But you're saying "information" as though all "information" is equivalent. Branding provides short hand information that the corporations want you to digest. I'm saying that there is other information out there that they don't want you to digest, and that branding may even obfuscate that information.
No, information is not free, but as established, the cost of the information the corporations want you to have is free and the cost of the information that I, or others, might want you to have is not, and I don't know why that's just a-okay as the tradeoff, why, in a world where information isn't free, theirs get through and not others', and why that can't be critiqued. Why do they get to control the flow of information? And is it actually good for us that they do? Maybe consumers should have to do research into the many different variants of Con-Agra Glutino products and not into the fact that all these products are all Con-Agra? Why one and not the other, besides that the one makes Con-Agra more money and the other does not?
Hell, wouldn't slapping the parent corporation onto every brand itself be a trivial way of adding more information in a way that doesn't make anything worse? Frito-Lay's Fritos. Frito-Lay's Doritos. Frito-Lay's Ruffles. What's wrong with this model? (Other than that it should be Pepsico, but whatever.)
The brand is a name that goes on a product. It doesn’t mean that the information is “what they want you to have” the information is whatever is associated with that brand, good or bad. This from personal experience, product reviews, journalism, etc
Fritos, doritos, and ruffles are brands. You claim to want to do away with that. Adding parent companies to products would be fine. But I really don’t think it’s going to solve what you think it solves.
Fritos, doritos, and ruffles are all tagged with the frito lay branding. We know those are all made by the same people because they tell us they are.
What you might not get is that those are all Pepsi products
As are aunt jemima maple syrup, captain crunch, and sabra hummus, as well as a host of other products
Right, but that's the point. If there is even a problem here, it's that all those brands are owned by one corporation. The existence of those separate brands is fine and actually conveys information to the consumer about the product they are purchasing.
No that's the problem is they obfuscate that it's all part of the same corporate shed. They all follow the same rules. If i have a problem with Pepsi co, but don't realize that sabra is pepsico hunmus then im not able to properly inform my purchase
Inform your purchase in what sense?
Knowing who's product I'm buying
What is the relevance? Is the product different somehow?
If tomorrow the CEO of PepsiCo said “10% of all of our profits from now on are going to this charity for Nazi pedophiles” you would want to know which products to avoid without having to spend an afternoon on Google looking it up
Right, so this isn't an issue of competition at all. It's an issue of boycotting. It's got nothing to do with whether branding gives a false impression of competition. Hell, I'm not even sure anti-trust law applies to the ability to boycott.
No the problem is that information isn't free and cannot be free. Branding can provide short hand information to make that information easier to digest.
In situations where research is expected to be done it doesn't cause a problem
In situations where information is naturally high it doesn't cause a problem
In situations where information is naturally low it "does" cause a problem and does is in quotes because I am asserting its the low information and not the branding that causes the problem.
That is, if we got rid of brands you would not be better off in those low information situations. You'd be just as fucked. But you would have more information costs in situations where information is naturally high (because you, presumably, don't starve and also buy your own food)
But you're saying "information" as though all "information" is equivalent. Branding provides short hand information that the corporations want you to digest. I'm saying that there is other information out there that they don't want you to digest, and that branding may even obfuscate that information.
No, information is not free, but as established, the cost of the information the corporations want you to have is free and the cost of the information that I, or others, might want you to have is not, and I don't know why that's just a-okay as the tradeoff, why, in a world where information isn't free, theirs get through and not others', and why that can't be critiqued. Why do they get to control the flow of information? And is it actually good for us that they do? Maybe consumers should have to do research into the many different variants of Con-Agra Glutino products and not into the fact that all these products are all Con-Agra? Why one and not the other, besides that the one makes Con-Agra more money and the other does not?
Hell, wouldn't slapping the parent corporation onto every brand itself be a trivial way of adding more information in a way that doesn't make anything worse? Frito-Lay's Fritos. Frito-Lay's Doritos. Frito-Lay's Ruffles. What's wrong with this model? (Other than that it should be Pepsico, but whatever.)
The brand is a name that goes on a product. It doesn’t mean that the information is “what they want you to have” the information is whatever is associated with that brand, good or bad. This from personal experience, product reviews, journalism, etc
Fritos, doritos, and ruffles are brands. You claim to want to do away with that. Adding parent companies to products would be fine. But I really don’t think it’s going to solve what you think it solves.
Fritos, doritos, and ruffles are all tagged with the frito lay branding. We know those are all made by the same people because they tell us they are.
What you might not get is that those are all Pepsi products
As are aunt jemima maple syrup, captain crunch, and sabra hummus, as well as a host of other products
Right, but that's the point. If there is even a problem here, it's that all those brands are owned by one corporation. The existence of those separate brands is fine and actually conveys information to the consumer about the product they are purchasing.
No that's the problem is they obfuscate that it's all part of the same corporate shed. They all follow the same rules. If i have a problem with Pepsi co, but don't realize that sabra is pepsico hunmus then im not able to properly inform my purchase
Inform your purchase in what sense?
Knowing who's product I'm buying
What is the relevance? Is the product different somehow?
If tomorrow the CEO of PepsiCo said “10% of all of our profits from now on are going to this charity for Nazi pedophiles” you would want to know which products to avoid without having to spend an afternoon on Google looking it up
Right, so this isn't an issue of competition at all. It's an issue of boycotting. It's got nothing to do with whether branding gives a false impression of competition. Hell, I'm not even sure anti-trust law applies to the ability to boycott.
If Company X had 20 product recalls in the last year that led to 100 customer deaths, would you consider someone forgoing buying their products to be boycotting?
The primary issue with brand obscurity isn't consumer confusion on who might own who it's the elimination of competitors via merger and acquisition. I couldn't care less if the consumer doesn't know if Snapple and Dr Pepper are the same company. I care if Whirlpool buys out Maytag and closes their factories because they wanted the brand not the workers.
It seems to me that one leads to the other. It's because you don't know that Snapple and Dr. Pepper are the same company that whoever once owned Snapple could buy up whoever once owned Dr. Pepper. (Don't think this actually happened, btw.)
You say that you care if Whirlpool buys out Maytag, but you wouldn't even know that Whirlpool had bought out Maytag if you didn't also know that Whirlpool owned Whirlpool and Maytag. If Maytag products had to legally be branded "Whirlpool presents Maytag" now, then you and everybody else would immediately know that Whirlpool bought out Maytag, and then you/they could (possibly) start caring about it. Remember, part of this discussion spawned from people not knowing that so many household products were produced by the same few multinationals. Branding, in the manner it is currently done, prevents people, to some degree, from knowing about the thing you care about.
Why? Did the products change from that (hypothetical) acquisition? Does anyone even care?
Snapple is a semi-famous case study in brand management because it's a good example of how to create a brand, destroy a brand, and then build the brand back up again.
Snapple was originally founded by 3 friends who stumbled into a multimillion dollar business by being (to quote brand professor Mark Ritson) "three fucking hippies who didn't know any fucking better". Their focus on just a good product, advertised with real employees (Wendy Kaufman "The Snapple Lady" genuinely did respond to Snapple fan-mail in her spare time prior any tv ads), led to international exposure on Seinfeld and people literally shipping cases of Snapple from New York to LA in their plane luggage (it was pretty much exclusively east coast at the time - not because of any strategic distribution decision but because they were, to repeat, "three fucking hippies who didn't know any fucking better").
Snapple was sold in 1994 to Quaker Oats for $1.7billion (post-Snapple debacle, Quaker were themselves acquired by Pepsi in 2001) who were hitting it big at the time with Gatorade - coming off the back of the "Be Like Mike" campaign with Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls' 91-93 three-peat. Quaker looked to cut costs, consolidating some of the supply chain and manufacture with Gatorade, but more importantly looked to expand the distribution, and therefore sales, using the same base template. They dropped Wendy as the spokesperson and went for the same mass-market, sports-centric marketing that had served them well with Gatorade. Whether there were any substantial changes to the product itself is debatable, but it was a complete disaster and sales plummeted instead of expanding. Three years later, Quaker called it quits and sold Snapple to Triarc (now Wendy's) for a mere $300million.
Triarc turned out to be a good fit for the quirky Snapple. They brought back Wendy (Kaufman, not the fast-food Wendy) and looked to manage it independently from their other brands to focus on the fans who genuinely liked the drink. Again there probably weren't substantial changes to the product itself, but by going back to the roots of the relationship with the consumer Triarc rebuilt the brand. Three years later, Triarc sold Snapple to Cadbury Schweppes in 2000 for $1.45billion.
Interestingly enough, the only definitive change to the product itself came after it was spun off into the independent Dr Pepper Snapple Group in 2008, when they swapped HCF for sugar in the recipe. The Dr Pepper Snapple Group was acquired earlier this year by Keurig for $18.7billion, forming the 3rd largest beverage company in North America.
So Snapple has been passed around various owners over the last 25 years. While consumers may not have even been consciously aware of the change of ownership during the 90's, the change in management brought two $1billion+ swings in company valuation through the new owner's engagement with customers. It's a pretty good example that who owns a brand does matter, even if consumers don't know who that owner is and even if the owner doesn't make material changes to the product itself.
Is it? It seems like who owns the brand matters for the brand valuation, which is itself irrelevant to the consumer, but didn't actually stop consumers from making choices about what they drank. Your example here actually demonstrates that Snapple consumers were very easily and clearly able to express their preferences about the brand despite changes in ownership they likely knew nothing about. The brand didn't obscure or hide anything to them.
I'm really curious, what would some of you that are so against branding actually want to see as the end result? Maybe this morning's coffee just hasn't kicked in, but I honestly can't even think of a scenario that is meaningfully different from just requiring that a parent company/ultimate owner's name be included on the packaging.
Because again, you're going to have to differentiate your product's name somehow so your consumers can identify it, and whatever that is would just become the de facto new brand.
Fine.
You seem to be mistaken that the problem is in the assignment of names to products. It is not. I, and others, have laid out all the ways in which megacorporations get to do things with brands, to their advantage, that we cannot do with our own identities.
The problem is not in the having of names, but the having of so many, that can be discarded and created so easily.
(Also just because brand names carry some information, doesn't mean they don't do other things too like mislead consumers. That fallacy is getting a little old. Things can have multiple attributes! With varying desirability! It's called a tradeoff! And I'm umsure if anybody has ever consciously made a decision about this particular tradeoff so much as just let the "guiding hand of capitalism" just have at it.)
No the problem is that information isn't free and cannot be free. Branding can provide short hand information to make that information easier to digest.
In situations where research is expected to be done it doesn't cause a problem
In situations where information is naturally high it doesn't cause a problem
In situations where information is naturally low it "does" cause a problem and does is in quotes because I am asserting its the low information and not the branding that causes the problem.
That is, if we got rid of brands you would not be better off in those low information situations. You'd be just as fucked. But you would have more information costs in situations where information is naturally high (because you, presumably, don't starve and also buy your own food)
But you're saying "information" as though all "information" is equivalent. Branding provides short hand information that the corporations want you to digest. I'm saying that there is other information out there that they don't want you to digest, and that branding may even obfuscate that information.
No, information is not free, but as established, the cost of the information the corporations want you to have is free and the cost of the information that I, or others, might want you to have is not, and I don't know why that's just a-okay as the tradeoff, why, in a world where information isn't free, theirs get through and not others', and why that can't be critiqued. Why do they get to control the flow of information? And is it actually good for us that they do? Maybe consumers should have to do research into the many different variants of Con-Agra Glutino products and not into the fact that all these products are all Con-Agra? Why one and not the other, besides that the one makes Con-Agra more money and the other does not?
Hell, wouldn't slapping the parent corporation onto every brand itself be a trivial way of adding more information in a way that doesn't make anything worse? Frito-Lay's Fritos. Frito-Lay's Doritos. Frito-Lay's Ruffles. What's wrong with this model? (Other than that it should be Pepsico, but whatever.)
The brand is a name that goes on a product. It doesn’t mean that the information is “what they want you to have” the information is whatever is associated with that brand, good or bad. This from personal experience, product reviews, journalism, etc
Fritos, doritos, and ruffles are brands. You claim to want to do away with that. Adding parent companies to products would be fine. But I really don’t think it’s going to solve what you think it solves.
Fritos, doritos, and ruffles are all tagged with the frito lay branding. We know those are all made by the same people because they tell us they are.
What you might not get is that those are all Pepsi products
As are aunt jemima maple syrup, captain crunch, and sabra hummus, as well as a host of other products
Right, but that's the point. If there is even a problem here, it's that all those brands are owned by one corporation. The existence of those separate brands is fine and actually conveys information to the consumer about the product they are purchasing.
No that's the problem is they obfuscate that it's all part of the same corporate shed. They all follow the same rules. If i have a problem with Pepsi co, but don't realize that sabra is pepsico hunmus then im not able to properly inform my purchase
Inform your purchase in what sense?
Knowing who's product I'm buying
What is the relevance? Is the product different somehow?
If tomorrow the CEO of PepsiCo said “10% of all of our profits from now on are going to this charity for Nazi pedophiles” you would want to know which products to avoid without having to spend an afternoon on Google looking it up
Right, so this isn't an issue of competition at all. It's an issue of boycotting. It's got nothing to do with whether branding gives a false impression of competition. Hell, I'm not even sure anti-trust law applies to the ability to boycott.
If Company X had 20 product recalls in the last year that led to 100 customer deaths, would you consider someone forgoing buying their products to be boycotting?
I'm really curious, what would some of you that are so against branding actually want to see as the end result? Maybe this morning's coffee just hasn't kicked in, but I honestly can't even think of a scenario that is meaningfully different from just requiring that a parent company/ultimate owner's name be included on the packaging.
Because again, you're going to have to differentiate your product's name somehow so your consumers can identify it, and whatever that is would just become the de facto new brand.
Fine.
You seem to be mistaken that the problem is in the assignment of names to products. It is not. I, and others, have laid out all the ways in which megacorporations get to do things with brands, to their advantage, that we cannot do with our own identities.
The problem is not in the having of names, but the having of so many, that can be discarded and created so easily.
(Also just because brand names carry some information, doesn't mean they don't do other things too like mislead consumers. That fallacy is getting a little old. Things can have multiple attributes! With varying desirability! It's called a tradeoff! And I'm umsure if anybody has ever consciously made a decision about this particular tradeoff so much as just let the "guiding hand of capitalism" just have at it.)
Brands can't be discarded or created easily. That's entirely the point of acquiring other brands, the thing you've been complaining about.
No the problem is that information isn't free and cannot be free. Branding can provide short hand information to make that information easier to digest.
In situations where research is expected to be done it doesn't cause a problem
In situations where information is naturally high it doesn't cause a problem
In situations where information is naturally low it "does" cause a problem and does is in quotes because I am asserting its the low information and not the branding that causes the problem.
That is, if we got rid of brands you would not be better off in those low information situations. You'd be just as fucked. But you would have more information costs in situations where information is naturally high (because you, presumably, don't starve and also buy your own food)
But you're saying "information" as though all "information" is equivalent. Branding provides short hand information that the corporations want you to digest. I'm saying that there is other information out there that they don't want you to digest, and that branding may even obfuscate that information.
No, information is not free, but as established, the cost of the information the corporations want you to have is free and the cost of the information that I, or others, might want you to have is not, and I don't know why that's just a-okay as the tradeoff, why, in a world where information isn't free, theirs get through and not others', and why that can't be critiqued. Why do they get to control the flow of information? And is it actually good for us that they do? Maybe consumers should have to do research into the many different variants of Con-Agra Glutino products and not into the fact that all these products are all Con-Agra? Why one and not the other, besides that the one makes Con-Agra more money and the other does not?
Hell, wouldn't slapping the parent corporation onto every brand itself be a trivial way of adding more information in a way that doesn't make anything worse? Frito-Lay's Fritos. Frito-Lay's Doritos. Frito-Lay's Ruffles. What's wrong with this model? (Other than that it should be Pepsico, but whatever.)
The brand is a name that goes on a product. It doesn’t mean that the information is “what they want you to have” the information is whatever is associated with that brand, good or bad. This from personal experience, product reviews, journalism, etc
Fritos, doritos, and ruffles are brands. You claim to want to do away with that. Adding parent companies to products would be fine. But I really don’t think it’s going to solve what you think it solves.
Fritos, doritos, and ruffles are all tagged with the frito lay branding. We know those are all made by the same people because they tell us they are.
What you might not get is that those are all Pepsi products
As are aunt jemima maple syrup, captain crunch, and sabra hummus, as well as a host of other products
Right, but that's the point. If there is even a problem here, it's that all those brands are owned by one corporation. The existence of those separate brands is fine and actually conveys information to the consumer about the product they are purchasing.
No that's the problem is they obfuscate that it's all part of the same corporate shed. They all follow the same rules. If i have a problem with Pepsi co, but don't realize that sabra is pepsico hunmus then im not able to properly inform my purchase
Inform your purchase in what sense?
Knowing who's product I'm buying
What is the relevance? Is the product different somehow?
If tomorrow the CEO of PepsiCo said “10% of all of our profits from now on are going to this charity for Nazi pedophiles” you would want to know which products to avoid without having to spend an afternoon on Google looking it up
Right, so this isn't an issue of competition at all. It's an issue of boycotting. It's got nothing to do with whether branding gives a false impression of competition. Hell, I'm not even sure anti-trust law applies to the ability to boycott.
If Company X had 20 product recalls in the last year that led to 100 customer deaths, would you consider someone forgoing buying their products to be boycotting?
Why is the difference even relevant?
Because there is a dismissal here of boycotts for political reasons ("isn't an issue of competition at all"), but sometimes wanting to avoid or choose a company is the result of pragmatic choices based on knowledge of a company's business practices, safety record, and decisions to routinely use faulty manufacturing methods that produce lower quality, less durable products. While you can debate whether the former has anything to do with competition, the ability of a company to distinguish itself to the customers and influence their buying habits through scrupulously following best practices or to degrade its reputation by pushing for profit above all is 100 percent a result of a properly functioning competitive market.
I'm really curious, what would some of you that are so against branding actually want to see as the end result? Maybe this morning's coffee just hasn't kicked in, but I honestly can't even think of a scenario that is meaningfully different from just requiring that a parent company/ultimate owner's name be included on the packaging.
Because again, you're going to have to differentiate your product's name somehow so your consumers can identify it, and whatever that is would just become the de facto new brand.
Fine.
You seem to be mistaken that the problem is in the assignment of names to products. It is not. I, and others, have laid out all the ways in which megacorporations get to do things with brands, to their advantage, that we cannot do with our own identities.
The problem is not in the having of names, but the having of so many, that can be discarded and created so easily.
(Also just because brand names carry some information, doesn't mean they don't do other things too like mislead consumers. That fallacy is getting a little old. Things can have multiple attributes! With varying desirability! It's called a tradeoff! And I'm umsure if anybody has ever consciously made a decision about this particular tradeoff so much as just let the "guiding hand of capitalism" just have at it.)
Brands can't be discarded or created easily. That's entirely the point of acquiring other brands, the thing you've been complaining about.
Brands != valuable brands with preexisting customer bases
This seems an obvious fallacy to me. (Esp wrt to discarding/terminating a brand.)
I'm really curious, what would some of you that are so against branding actually want to see as the end result? Maybe this morning's coffee just hasn't kicked in, but I honestly can't even think of a scenario that is meaningfully different from just requiring that a parent company/ultimate owner's name be included on the packaging.
Because again, you're going to have to differentiate your product's name somehow so your consumers can identify it, and whatever that is would just become the de facto new brand.
Fine.
You seem to be mistaken that the problem is in the assignment of names to products. It is not. I, and others, have laid out all the ways in which megacorporations get to do things with brands, to their advantage, that we cannot do with our own identities.
The problem is not in the having of names, but the having of so many, that can be discarded and created so easily.
(Also just because brand names carry some information, doesn't mean they don't do other things too like mislead consumers. That fallacy is getting a little old. Things can have multiple attributes! With varying desirability! It's called a tradeoff! And I'm umsure if anybody has ever consciously made a decision about this particular tradeoff so much as just let the "guiding hand of capitalism" just have at it.)
Brands can't be discarded or created easily. That's entirely the point of acquiring other brands, the thing you've been complaining about.
Brands != valuable brands with preexisting customer bases
This seems an obvious fallacy to me. (Esp wrt to discarding/terminating a brand.)
What does this even mean? I have no idea what you are trying to say here.
You said "The problem is not in the having of names, but the having of so many, that can be discarded and created so easily.". But this is not even accurate to what's being argued since brands can't be easily discarded or created and the whole point of having those brands is because branding takes a long time to create and is very powerful. That's why these megacorps acquire and keep other brand, which is the very thing you've been complaining about.
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
Brands provide consumer information. That’s good! Brands are good.
Brands can also be used to obfuscate consumer information, for example about parent companies. That’s bad! Parent companies should have to put logos on the packaging next to the brands.
I have no idea why either of those opinions should be in any way controversial. Frankly this discussion feels fueled by sniping. Can people restate their thesis, as I’ve done here?
Doritos is a product name not a brand. Frito lay is a brand of chips. Pepsi is a brand of soda. Pepsi cola is a product that is synonymous with pepsi the brand but is not what pepsi the brand refers to. Mountain dew is pepsi lemon lime soda. Doritos are pepsi nacho cheese flavored corn chips.
When you go to a restaurant you know you're either getting pepsi products or coke products, and that doesn't necessarily mean cola.
Making sure oreos are clearly and prominently labeled as a product of mondelez international inc, and that mountain dew, doritos, sodastream, and sabra hummus are all labeled as PepsiCo products while possibly damaging to PepsiCo is only helpful to informing the consumers on who they are supporting with their money.
I'm really curious, what would some of you that are so against branding actually want to see as the end result? Maybe this morning's coffee just hasn't kicked in, but I honestly can't even think of a scenario that is meaningfully different from just requiring that a parent company/ultimate owner's name be included on the packaging.
Because again, you're going to have to differentiate your product's name somehow so your consumers can identify it, and whatever that is would just become the de facto new brand.
I'm not against branding, I'm against branding being used to hide how monopolized society has become. For the issue of branding, adding the penultimate parent companies name in the same type and font as the branding would address the issue for me. I would be fine with Mondelez Oreo Cookies, for example.
I agree that ultimately we need to break up the many large corporations into smaller pieces. I don't think that we have the political will to do so at this time, but I do think we could either pass a law requiring corporations to list their penultimate company or use one of the various federal departments to enact such a requirement (FDA or SEC, for example). This would increase public awareness of how few corporations actually make the majority of products we use in our daily lives and lead to us building the will to break up such companies.
Making sure oreos are clearly and prominently labeled as a product of mondelez international inc, and that mountain dew, doritos, sodastream, and sabra hummus are all labeled as PepsiCo products while possibly damaging to PepsiCo is only helpful to informing the consumers on who they are supporting with their money.
Doritos is a product name not a brand. Frito lay is a brand of chips. Pepsi is a brand of soda. Pepsi cola is a product that is synonymous with pepsi the brand but is not what pepsi the brand refers to. Mountain dew is pepsi lemon lime soda. Doritos are pepsi nacho cheese flavored corn chips.
When you go to a restaurant you know you're either getting pepsi products or coke products, and that doesn't necessarily mean cola.
Making sure oreos are clearly and prominently labeled as a product of mondelez international inc, and that mountain dew, doritos, sodastream, and sabra hummus are all labeled as PepsiCo products while possibly damaging to PepsiCo is only helpful to informing the consumers on who they are supporting with their money.
Doritos is a brand. It is a brand of tortilla chips. The Doritos brand is a part of the registered trademark owned by Frito Lay in the United States (and elsewhere I assume).
This information is freely accessible through the US Patent Office, http://tess2.uspto.gov/.
Making sure oreos are clearly and prominently labeled as a product of mondelez international inc, and that mountain dew, doritos, sodastream, and sabra hummus are all labeled as PepsiCo products while possibly damaging to PepsiCo is only helpful to informing the consumers on who they are supporting with their money.
The only problem I see with obfuscated brands is that it obscures monopolies.
Yea but like... That doesn't change anything. The power of a monopoly doesn't change if you know they're a monopoly. That is like... why companies want them.
Whirlpool by Kenmore wouldn't make you think that Whirlpools were the exact same product as the lower quality normal Kenmores. So the lack of the parent company doesn't change your perception of the product. You would have to do the same research to find out the thing that people want to fix.
There would be no reason to suggest that Doritos would be made in the same factory as Pepsi, which had all those terrible recalls* that you want to avoid for consumer production issues, and so adding that information doesn't much tell you about whether or not Doritos are safe.
*As far as i know this is an example from the thread and pepsi has not had recalls)
The only problem I see with obfuscated brands is that it obscures monopolies.
Yea but like... That doesn't change anything. The power of a monopoly doesn't change if you know they're a monopoly. That is like... why companies want them.
Whirlpool by Kenmore wouldn't make you think that Whirlpools were the exact same product as the lower quality normal Kenmores. So the lack of the parent company doesn't change your perception of the product. You would have to do the same research to find out the thing that people want to fix.
There would be no reason to suggest that Doritos would be made in the same factory as Pepsi, which had all those terrible recalls* that you want to avoid for consumer production issues, and so adding that information doesn't much tell you about whether or not Doritos are safe.
*As far as i know this is an example from the thread and pepsi has not had recalls)
Sabra hummus 2016 for listeria
Pepsi has definitely had recalls.
As well the question is about ethical consumerism which is impossible at the moment because the monopolies are hidden.
Pepsi, not anything pepsi made. Because Sabra Hummus isn't made in the same plant they make pepsi and so knowing about the recall for one brand does not necessarily imply a recall for another brand owned by the same parent company... because that isn't how companies or factories work
No the problem is that information isn't free and cannot be free. Branding can provide short hand information to make that information easier to digest.
In situations where research is expected to be done it doesn't cause a problem
In situations where information is naturally high it doesn't cause a problem
In situations where information is naturally low it "does" cause a problem and does is in quotes because I am asserting its the low information and not the branding that causes the problem.
That is, if we got rid of brands you would not be better off in those low information situations. You'd be just as fucked. But you would have more information costs in situations where information is naturally high (because you, presumably, don't starve and also buy your own food)
But you're saying "information" as though all "information" is equivalent. Branding provides short hand information that the corporations want you to digest. I'm saying that there is other information out there that they don't want you to digest, and that branding may even obfuscate that information.
No, information is not free, but as established, the cost of the information the corporations want you to have is free and the cost of the information that I, or others, might want you to have is not, and I don't know why that's just a-okay as the tradeoff, why, in a world where information isn't free, theirs get through and not others', and why that can't be critiqued. Why do they get to control the flow of information? And is it actually good for us that they do? Maybe consumers should have to do research into the many different variants of Con-Agra Glutino products and not into the fact that all these products are all Con-Agra? Why one and not the other, besides that the one makes Con-Agra more money and the other does not?
Hell, wouldn't slapping the parent corporation onto every brand itself be a trivial way of adding more information in a way that doesn't make anything worse? Frito-Lay's Fritos. Frito-Lay's Doritos. Frito-Lay's Ruffles. What's wrong with this model? (Other than that it should be Pepsico, but whatever.)
The brand is a name that goes on a product. It doesn’t mean that the information is “what they want you to have” the information is whatever is associated with that brand, good or bad. This from personal experience, product reviews, journalism, etc
Fritos, doritos, and ruffles are brands. You claim to want to do away with that. Adding parent companies to products would be fine. But I really don’t think it’s going to solve what you think it solves.
Fritos, doritos, and ruffles are all tagged with the frito lay branding. We know those are all made by the same people because they tell us they are.
What you might not get is that those are all Pepsi products
As are aunt jemima maple syrup, captain crunch, and sabra hummus, as well as a host of other products
Right, but that's the point. If there is even a problem here, it's that all those brands are owned by one corporation. The existence of those separate brands is fine and actually conveys information to the consumer about the product they are purchasing.
No that's the problem is they obfuscate that it's all part of the same corporate shed. They all follow the same rules. If i have a problem with Pepsi co, but don't realize that sabra is pepsico hunmus then im not able to properly inform my purchase
Inform your purchase in what sense?
Knowing who's product I'm buying
What is the relevance? Is the product different somehow?
If tomorrow the CEO of PepsiCo said “10% of all of our profits from now on are going to this charity for Nazi pedophiles” you would want to know which products to avoid without having to spend an afternoon on Google looking it up
Right, so this isn't an issue of competition at all. It's an issue of boycotting. It's got nothing to do with whether branding gives a false impression of competition. Hell, I'm not even sure anti-trust law applies to the ability to boycott.
If Company X had 20 product recalls in the last year that led to 100 customer deaths, would you consider someone forgoing buying their products to be boycotting?
Why is the difference even relevant?
Because there is a dismissal here of boycotts for political reasons ("isn't an issue of competition at all"), but sometimes wanting to avoid or choose a company is the result of pragmatic choices based on knowledge of a company's business practices, safety record, and decisions to routinely use faulty manufacturing methods that produce lower quality, less durable products. While you can debate whether the former has anything to do with competition, the ability of a company to distinguish itself to the customers and influence their buying habits through scrupulously following best practices or to degrade its reputation by pushing for profit above all is 100 percent a result of a properly functioning competitive market.
What if the two products are not even made in the same factory by the same people? What if the two brands are managed separately? Knowing both brands are owned by the same company doesn't actually tell you anything useful about this at a glance.
Nor does it actually create any more competition within the market since, you know, they are still gonna be owned by the same people regardless.
Like, Brands contain useful information. A company owning multiple brands is not detrimental since those brands could be doing different things and not be effecting competition within the overall market.
At the same time knowing who owns which brands isn't really useful information to the consumer making a choice about those products most of the time. Certainly not just on it's own. It helps establish boycotts, sure, but that also suggests a level of engagement where you would expect people to be doing research anyway and so the "this brand owned by X company" label is doing a lot less work then people seem to be implying. Primarily it would mostly seem to help raise awareness. "Holy shit, Pepsi owns everything" or the like.
Pepsi, not anything pepsi made. Because Sabra Hummus isn't made in the same plant they make pepsi and so knowing about the recall for one brand does not necessarily imply a recall for another brand owned by the same parent company... because that isn't how companies or factories work
It might not even be relevant to other Sabra Hummus since it might not all be made in just 1 location you don't know if the issue is process-based or just specific to a certain factory.
This information is not as immediately useful as it might seem basically.
I'm really curious, what would some of you that are so against branding actually want to see as the end result? Maybe this morning's coffee just hasn't kicked in, but I honestly can't even think of a scenario that is meaningfully different from just requiring that a parent company/ultimate owner's name be included on the packaging.
Because again, you're going to have to differentiate your product's name somehow so your consumers can identify it, and whatever that is would just become the de facto new brand.
Fine.
You seem to be mistaken that the problem is in the assignment of names to products. It is not. I, and others, have laid out all the ways in which megacorporations get to do things with brands, to their advantage, that we cannot do with our own identities.
The problem is not in the having of names, but the having of so many, that can be discarded and created so easily.
(Also just because brand names carry some information, doesn't mean they don't do other things too like mislead consumers. That fallacy is getting a little old. Things can have multiple attributes! With varying desirability! It's called a tradeoff! And I'm umsure if anybody has ever consciously made a decision about this particular tradeoff so much as just let the "guiding hand of capitalism" just have at it.)
Brands can't be discarded or created easily. That's entirely the point of acquiring other brands, the thing you've been complaining about.
Brands != valuable brands with preexisting customer bases
This seems an obvious fallacy to me. (Esp wrt to discarding/terminating a brand.)
What does this even mean? I have no idea what you are trying to say here.
You said "The problem is not in the having of names, but the having of so many, that can be discarded and created so easily.". But this is not even accurate to what's being argued since brands can't be easily discarded or created and the whole point of having those brands is because branding takes a long time to create and is very powerful. That's why these megacorps acquire and keep other brand, which is the very thing you've been complaining about.
I... uh... just have no idea what to say here. It seems plainly obvious to me. It's fairly easy to create a brand: draw up a logo, register a trademark, label your products, and then promote them. Branding is not a new innovation of the 21st century. Ancient craftsmen would also brand their products by putting their names on them.
The fact that it's easy to create a brand does not remove the incentive for people to purchase an established brand that already exists. When I create a new brand, it has no adherents, no market penetration, no consumer awareness. When I purchase a long-established brand, it... comes with those things? Corporations do both, obviously, since they have to create brands in order to have them acquired by other corporations. So... the fact that corporations acquire brands from other corporations doesn't at all negate the fact that brands are easy to create and also dismiss (by simply discontinuing a product line or branding that product line). - Note, creating a brand is not the same as building a brand.
It's... like... it seems eminently and plainly obvious to me. Just like how forging a new identity is not the same as stealing another's identity, and the fact that people steal identities does not mean that it's hard to create a new identity (though it may be so, independently of that fact). There are additional reasons that people might steal an identity rather than create a new one, but ... like... I have no idea what the issue is here. Corporations do more than one thing, because they have more than one incentive and operate in more than one situation (and also there are many of them). There's nothing here that's mutually exclusive? Sorry.
I feel like @Astaereth pretty much gets it. I don't actually know why this is so difficult to get. Things have... multiple attributes. Actors have... multiple interests. Not everything is black and white, good or bad. I wanted to prompt a discussion of how we might "fix" branding in the consumer markets and how that might impact the economy - @Goumindong says it wouldn't impact much but I'd like to explore that a bit more - but clearly we can't get over that first hump of what branding even is, and mod decree, so... /shrug.
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
Leaving aside the consumer information, people having an easier time understanding just how bad corporate consolidation has gotten—being able to see that just by walking down the “PepsiCo Presents” aisle in their grocery store—can help build political will to actually do something to enforce antritrust laws.
Which we desperately need, because the fewer companies competing in an industry, the less reason they have to compete on product quality and price for consumers OR on wages and benefits for employees.
Income inequality is easily in the top 3 problems we face as a country, and one of its root causes is corporate consolidation, which companies are currently allowed to pretend hasn’t happened in all sorts of ways, including product branding. People can’t fight a problem that hasn’t been made clear to them. There are lots of reasons to legislate transparency in branding but for anyone against income inequality one of them surely must be political strategy.
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You know Frito-Lay already does that, right? Check out the back of a Doritos bag.
You can't give someone a pirate ship in one game, and then take it back in the next game. It's rude.
idgi
Boy, it’s almost like they want to make it hard to find... like they’re....
What’s the word.... obfuscating it!
Frito-Lay is not the global ultimate owner/parent company. That's PepsiCo.
I can understand not branding it Pepsi, because in consumer minds (myself included) Pepsi is a different product and market. I might buy Pepsi and Doritos, but "Nacho Cheese Pepsi Chips" sounds gross.
You can't give someone a pirate ship in one game, and then take it back in the next game. It's rude.
Could be worse.
Nacho Cheese Pepsi Cola is the more disgusting option.
Because we assume a rational market and preying on emotional responses undermines the assumption. You're encouraging irrational decision making.
Brands are being used to obfuscate raw information with examples given in this thread of how a premium can be charged for the same product just by addition of a brand and many concrete examples of monopolistic practices being hidden behind branding.
Brands are a tool used by corporations to control information flow to the public for the benefit of the corporation.
There's plenty of problems with giant conglomerate mega corps, but I don't think the problem is that they're not slapping the parent company logo in 72PT font on every box.
You can't give someone a pirate ship in one game, and then take it back in the next game. It's rude.
Which again is a problem of lack of regulation. Placing the onus on consumers to reject certain products from unregulated monopolies isn't fair. People have bills to pay and mouths to feed.
Because again, you're going to have to differentiate your product's name somehow so your consumers can identify it, and whatever that is would just become the de facto new brand.
3DS: 0963-0539-4405
One of the reasons so many car dealerships have the owners name on the sign is that there are state regulations requiring that the owner must identify themselves to the customer. I could see a similar thing in the larger market - you can call it whatever you like under whatever brand name you like, but the umbrella company must still have its logo and name prominently displayed on the packaging.
If this leads customers to wonder why the same company is selling 4/5 of the products on the shelf and influences their choose accordingly, even if it is just picking the cheapest one after deciding they are "all the same", then so much the better. This would also make it a lot easier to swear off, say, a company that keeps getting hit with safety recalls.
Right, so this isn't an issue of competition at all. It's an issue of boycotting. It's got nothing to do with whether branding gives a false impression of competition. Hell, I'm not even sure anti-trust law applies to the ability to boycott.
If Company X had 20 product recalls in the last year that led to 100 customer deaths, would you consider someone forgoing buying their products to be boycotting?
Is it? It seems like who owns the brand matters for the brand valuation, which is itself irrelevant to the consumer, but didn't actually stop consumers from making choices about what they drank. Your example here actually demonstrates that Snapple consumers were very easily and clearly able to express their preferences about the brand despite changes in ownership they likely knew nothing about. The brand didn't obscure or hide anything to them.
Fine.
You seem to be mistaken that the problem is in the assignment of names to products. It is not. I, and others, have laid out all the ways in which megacorporations get to do things with brands, to their advantage, that we cannot do with our own identities.
The problem is not in the having of names, but the having of so many, that can be discarded and created so easily.
(Also just because brand names carry some information, doesn't mean they don't do other things too like mislead consumers. That fallacy is getting a little old. Things can have multiple attributes! With varying desirability! It's called a tradeoff! And I'm umsure if anybody has ever consciously made a decision about this particular tradeoff so much as just let the "guiding hand of capitalism" just have at it.)
Why is the difference even relevant?
Brands can't be discarded or created easily. That's entirely the point of acquiring other brands, the thing you've been complaining about.
Because there is a dismissal here of boycotts for political reasons ("isn't an issue of competition at all"), but sometimes wanting to avoid or choose a company is the result of pragmatic choices based on knowledge of a company's business practices, safety record, and decisions to routinely use faulty manufacturing methods that produce lower quality, less durable products. While you can debate whether the former has anything to do with competition, the ability of a company to distinguish itself to the customers and influence their buying habits through scrupulously following best practices or to degrade its reputation by pushing for profit above all is 100 percent a result of a properly functioning competitive market.
Brands != valuable brands with preexisting customer bases
This seems an obvious fallacy to me. (Esp wrt to discarding/terminating a brand.)
What does this even mean? I have no idea what you are trying to say here.
You said "The problem is not in the having of names, but the having of so many, that can be discarded and created so easily.". But this is not even accurate to what's being argued since brands can't be easily discarded or created and the whole point of having those brands is because branding takes a long time to create and is very powerful. That's why these megacorps acquire and keep other brand, which is the very thing you've been complaining about.
Brands can also be used to obfuscate consumer information, for example about parent companies. That’s bad! Parent companies should have to put logos on the packaging next to the brands.
I have no idea why either of those opinions should be in any way controversial. Frankly this discussion feels fueled by sniping. Can people restate their thesis, as I’ve done here?
Doritos is a product name not a brand. Frito lay is a brand of chips. Pepsi is a brand of soda. Pepsi cola is a product that is synonymous with pepsi the brand but is not what pepsi the brand refers to. Mountain dew is pepsi lemon lime soda. Doritos are pepsi nacho cheese flavored corn chips.
When you go to a restaurant you know you're either getting pepsi products or coke products, and that doesn't necessarily mean cola.
Making sure oreos are clearly and prominently labeled as a product of mondelez international inc, and that mountain dew, doritos, sodastream, and sabra hummus are all labeled as PepsiCo products while possibly damaging to PepsiCo is only helpful to informing the consumers on who they are supporting with their money.
I'm not against branding, I'm against branding being used to hide how monopolized society has become. For the issue of branding, adding the penultimate parent companies name in the same type and font as the branding would address the issue for me. I would be fine with Mondelez Oreo Cookies, for example.
I agree that ultimately we need to break up the many large corporations into smaller pieces. I don't think that we have the political will to do so at this time, but I do think we could either pass a law requiring corporations to list their penultimate company or use one of the various federal departments to enact such a requirement (FDA or SEC, for example). This would increase public awareness of how few corporations actually make the majority of products we use in our daily lives and lead to us building the will to break up such companies.
This seems like a good thing?
Doritos is a brand. It is a brand of tortilla chips. The Doritos brand is a part of the registered trademark owned by Frito Lay in the United States (and elsewhere I assume).
This information is freely accessible through the US Patent Office, http://tess2.uspto.gov/.
It would be a good thing
Yea but like... That doesn't change anything. The power of a monopoly doesn't change if you know they're a monopoly. That is like... why companies want them.
Whirlpool by Kenmore wouldn't make you think that Whirlpools were the exact same product as the lower quality normal Kenmores. So the lack of the parent company doesn't change your perception of the product. You would have to do the same research to find out the thing that people want to fix.
There would be no reason to suggest that Doritos would be made in the same factory as Pepsi, which had all those terrible recalls* that you want to avoid for consumer production issues, and so adding that information doesn't much tell you about whether or not Doritos are safe.
*As far as i know this is an example from the thread and pepsi has not had recalls)
Sabra hummus 2016 for listeria
Pepsi has definitely had recalls.
As well the question is about ethical consumerism which is impossible at the moment because the monopolies are hidden.
What if the two products are not even made in the same factory by the same people? What if the two brands are managed separately? Knowing both brands are owned by the same company doesn't actually tell you anything useful about this at a glance.
Nor does it actually create any more competition within the market since, you know, they are still gonna be owned by the same people regardless.
Like, Brands contain useful information. A company owning multiple brands is not detrimental since those brands could be doing different things and not be effecting competition within the overall market.
At the same time knowing who owns which brands isn't really useful information to the consumer making a choice about those products most of the time. Certainly not just on it's own. It helps establish boycotts, sure, but that also suggests a level of engagement where you would expect people to be doing research anyway and so the "this brand owned by X company" label is doing a lot less work then people seem to be implying. Primarily it would mostly seem to help raise awareness. "Holy shit, Pepsi owns everything" or the like.
It might not even be relevant to other Sabra Hummus since it might not all be made in just 1 location you don't know if the issue is process-based or just specific to a certain factory.
This information is not as immediately useful as it might seem basically.
I... uh... just have no idea what to say here. It seems plainly obvious to me. It's fairly easy to create a brand: draw up a logo, register a trademark, label your products, and then promote them. Branding is not a new innovation of the 21st century. Ancient craftsmen would also brand their products by putting their names on them.
The fact that it's easy to create a brand does not remove the incentive for people to purchase an established brand that already exists. When I create a new brand, it has no adherents, no market penetration, no consumer awareness. When I purchase a long-established brand, it... comes with those things? Corporations do both, obviously, since they have to create brands in order to have them acquired by other corporations. So... the fact that corporations acquire brands from other corporations doesn't at all negate the fact that brands are easy to create and also dismiss (by simply discontinuing a product line or branding that product line). - Note, creating a brand is not the same as building a brand.
It's... like... it seems eminently and plainly obvious to me. Just like how forging a new identity is not the same as stealing another's identity, and the fact that people steal identities does not mean that it's hard to create a new identity (though it may be so, independently of that fact). There are additional reasons that people might steal an identity rather than create a new one, but ... like... I have no idea what the issue is here. Corporations do more than one thing, because they have more than one incentive and operate in more than one situation (and also there are many of them). There's nothing here that's mutually exclusive? Sorry.
I feel like @Astaereth pretty much gets it. I don't actually know why this is so difficult to get. Things have... multiple attributes. Actors have... multiple interests. Not everything is black and white, good or bad. I wanted to prompt a discussion of how we might "fix" branding in the consumer markets and how that might impact the economy - @Goumindong says it wouldn't impact much but I'd like to explore that a bit more - but clearly we can't get over that first hump of what branding even is, and mod decree, so... /shrug.
Which we desperately need, because the fewer companies competing in an industry, the less reason they have to compete on product quality and price for consumers OR on wages and benefits for employees.
Income inequality is easily in the top 3 problems we face as a country, and one of its root causes is corporate consolidation, which companies are currently allowed to pretend hasn’t happened in all sorts of ways, including product branding. People can’t fight a problem that hasn’t been made clear to them. There are lots of reasons to legislate transparency in branding but for anyone against income inequality one of them surely must be political strategy.