When brands are king

Before yesterday, you could have forgiven me for not knowing about a relationship between the roast beef fast food chain Arby's and the sports restaurant Buffalo Wild Wings - namely because there was no such relationship until yesterday.

But I didn't know that there was a relationship between Wendy's and Arby's. Turns out Wendy's owns 18.5% of Arby's (and thus will benefit from any price increase resulting from the BWW acquisition).

I work in a different environment - one in which you know when brands are associated with each other. This was most apparent during my years working for (pre-split) Motorola, in which Motorola WAS the brand. Whether talking about a RAZR or a police radio, you knew that the product came from Motorola.

But this appears to be the exception rather than the rule. I'm sure that there are LinkedIn users who don't realize that LinkedIn is part of Microsoft. And I wouldn't be surprised to find YouTube users who don't realize that YouTube is part of Google.