fishboat wrote:John61CT wrote:I'm thinking, as has been **very** common in tech industries, acquire a product that is superior to yours and kill it off, eliminating competition to your higher margin one.
Possible, but typically a company wouldn't adopt the superior product's name if they have something out there already
Exactly what's happened here. The Glidden name never got a huge marketing budget, and it's now being phased out.
Gripper is currently an inferior product with the PPG name in front of it.
> It confuses (read market share loss) the customers and the superior product name with junk inside doesn't fool anyone other than one-off big box consumers
The majority of customers are low-knowledge, the source of huge profits.
What made GG great for our purposes - cohesive / tensile strength & incredible adhesion to nearly any substrate, at a very low price - is well outside the usual mainstream use cases for primer.
In fact safe to say 99.99% of its market never actually needed its special properties, and will be served just fine by the inferior replacement, zero loss of PPG profits, just gains from lowering costs.
> would reject the first shipment of the 'fake' product under the superior product name.
Nope, the PPG labels the new stuff as a different product.
> PPG wouldn't do it...they've been around a long time.
Are you trying to say Glidden Gripper hasn't already been discontinued?
> Nobody wins when a good product is killed intentionally.
Poppycock. The buyer eliminates a superior competitor, even with short-term losses, that investment increases market share and profitability long term.
No one loses but the customers and employees of the firm / brand purchased.
Happens every. gd. week. in hundreds of industries.