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Marketing departments tend to get addicted to the
smell of their own farts.
That's not necessarily why they do it. Pontiac, Mercury, Oldsmobile, Saturn
So part of the reason they do it is simply to flood the market. Imagine a world where GM has Saturn, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Geo, Chevy, GMC, etc. And Ford just has... Ford.To a casual, who doesn't know or care that six of those brands are just GM nameplates, they just see seven options for a sedan. And if I'm GM, I certainly like the odds that they'll pick a GM even though I'm essentially just designing one or two sedans and then advertising them six different ways. A simpler example (that somebody else mentioned down below) is toothpaste. There are like, ten different varieties of Colgate on the shelf. The point isn't that they expect me the consumer to know or care about the differences, or that they are so "addicted to the smell of their own farts" that they think there's a meaningful difference between brands of Colgate. The point is that they want to consume shelf space, crowd other brands out, and send the message that they are the default, safe choice for toothpaste. We can say that's dumb, but I suspect the sales figures would tell us they're having some success with that. |