Many of the popular dating apps are all owned by Match group -- Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, OurTime, etc. etc. It was a huge private equity play under IAC for awhile and then they spun out and IPOed but the universal dark patterns and enshitification isn't coincidental.
It's like Expedia owning many of the familiar travel brands: in reality they are all serving up the same content, but with different marketing, yet many people think it's a different company. You might think a brand is different and it might appeal to a different clientele but underneath its the same entity making all the decisions. It allows the brand to target different people without confusing everyone with a single brand saying different things; yet still allow for economies of scale. Great business for them, may seriously suck to be a customer since the alternatives are potentially no better if you don't like one.
> It allows the brand to target different people without confusing everyone with a single brand saying different things; yet still allow for economies of scale. Great business for them, may seriously suck to be a customer since the alternatives are potentially no better if you don't like one.
It also allows them to capture the money of disgruntled customers. Someone who has a terrible experience with (say) Tinder may swear it up and start using a "competitor" like ... OkCupid.
IIRC, this is also a strategy in home appliance space. My understanding is most home appliance brands are owned by just two companies: Whirlpool and Electrolux. They've really cheapened their designs, but if you get pissed off your washer breaks after 3 years and decide to go with a competitor, there's a good chance you may end up buying literally the same model, from the same company, with different branding and styling.
Relatedly, there has been a controversial dehumidifier recall recently due to how likely they are to catch fire. The recall impacts every dehumidifier made by Gree Electric Appliances between 2011 and 2014. That company sold the same basic dehumidifiers under the surface under at least 42 models under 5 different brands. Many of them look very different from each other, but functioned the same and exhibit the same fire safety issues of the recall.
At least twice investigators thought they found all of the models and brands in play and then discovered even more. Plus, an older/related recall also still exists covering even more brands and models between 2005 and 2014.
One supplier, hundreds of models across dozens of brands. "Competition" at its finest.
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.
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.)
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.
