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| Sunday, August 22, 2004 |
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Branding bobble 
| | Back in the '80s and early '90s I worked with two companies that found themselves in branding and line extention snarls. |
| | The first was Motorola, which had two different divisions, one in Cupertino and the other in Tempe, both called Motorala Something Something, both selling an identical computer sytem by a different brand name, both equally anonymous. Complicating matters there was the prior identity of the Cupertino division, an acquired company called Four Phase. Interesting datum: The Cupertino outfit was located in Silicon Valley's largest single building, at the corner of DeAnza and 280. That building was condemned after the Loma Prieta earthquake. The new building is Apple's headquarters, at (the renamed) One Infinite Loop. |
| | The second was Zenith Data Systems, which was acquired by Groupe Bull in France from Zenith the TV maker. ZDS, as it was known, was not allowed to do anything with its logo (which had to say "...Data Systems") that leveraged the brand name it had acquired along with the business, which was making PCs and laptops (including some pretty good ones for awhile there). |
| | Both companies were in hopeless positions, in the long run. Motorola is thankfully down to just one division (the Tempe one) where before there were two, and ZDS is gone completely. |
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