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Comment by brettnak | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to see so many new businesses forget the lessons that previous businesses learned. Brand identity and trust used to be the foundation of businesses, and at some level (I'm not sure what level) it still is. Even as someone educated on the differences between BF & BFN, I still never knew how to take BFN seriously with all the regular crap on BF. I don't really feel like it's my job to figure out how they fit together, and it would have been pretty simple just to completely split the brands if they actually wanted to have the two faces of the company. To the average internet reader, there was no difference between BF and BFN. People have either always known, or are learning (however slowly) that they can't vet every story themselves and they have to trust. BF corrupted that with their two faces.

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> Brand identity and trust used to be the foundation of businesses, and at some level (I'm not sure what level) it still is.

I think that was much more the case when the brand was the only brand. When the company lived or died by its chocolate, or single brand of appliances etc, even if the founder was gone, I think a lot of care was taken. Now a brand is commonly one of 10 or 30 in a portfolio, I don't think there's much care left.

When the parent has a dozen appliance brands you can play loose with the trust of any or all. Half the product may be little more than badge engineering. When there's dozens of food brands in the book, or the market leading brand gets bought, it's virtually certain they will be worse than they used to be. Often quite a lot. The perception of the brand might carry that for years.

BF is an odd one as it's trying to become a respectable news outlet, without letting go of the junk that made them. Now the perception has to go the other way, up. A much more difficult move.

The appliance makers are particularly insidious. They have cheapo brand and luxury brand, but luxury brand is often just slightly modified cheapo brand. As people get wise to this, suddenly luxury brand becomes the new cheapo brand and ultra-luxury brand is the new must have luxury brand. Cheapo brand goes away (end of life!!) so time to upgrade!

At least (for now) if you buy a Samsung or LG you know who to be pissed off at.

It is weird how things have flipped, but at the same time makes sense if you look at it from the bean counter's view. It used to be that companies would start with the luxury brand. These would cost premium prices, and would last in a time frame in line with their prices. They would then take features away (or just disable them) to make the lower tiers. Sometimes this meant replacing a metal something with a plastic something. The prices would be cheaper reflecting the missing options. It might not last as long, but it was a fraction of the price. Now, it seems like everything is just a cheap plastic something, and the entire thing is cheap enough to just buy a new whole thing instead of repairing the broken component. The prices are now in the middle pushing back up towards the premium pricing, but for much lower quality product.

Makes sense if you don't mind killing the golden goose. Same sales with far more profit, but only until public perception catches up with the reality that the big brand is now as bad, or worse, than some cheap competitor.

Sometimes you only need to buy the reformulated market leader once to realise there's no reason to ever buy it again.

Vehicles too. Buy the same bearing where the price depends on whether it comes in a VW, Audi or Porsche packet. Touareg vs Cayenne.

Trust may turn out to have been a 20th century concept.

Well perhaps Buzzfeed News shouldn't have had the word 'Buzzfeed' in it. I mean, most large companies make sure their brand names are far more distinct than that...

(like Buzzfeed's equally dodgy counterpart, News Corp and its different newspaper/news site names).

I’m not sure that the average internet reader knew the difference between buzzfeed, buzzfeed news, the New York Times, and any random fake news site a 16 year old threw up.

At the time, my view was that, Buzzfeed, and others, were just attempting to ride the tsunami of free Facebook traffic for a wildly bloated valuation in hopes to hoodwink a legacy media company into buying them before the party ended. They spent what would have been their profits, and then some, on shining their turds. It was a gamble and they mostly lost.

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