Abusing Your Good Name

I am getting irritated by companies that build their name on putting forth a quality product and then try to cash in by going selling crap under the same banner.

Anyone else out there remember the John Deere “Sabre”? It was a light green riding lawn mower with the John Deere name in small print. It was not made by John Deere. Turns out they weren’t built anything like a “real” John Deere. It was one of those made by MTD. One company makes one tractor with seven (or eight or nine) different paint jobs.

Then I heard about Honda push mowers. I mowed yards as a teenager using junk mowers, but found out through others in the business that Honda push mowers were almost bullet-proof. Then I heard - I think it was from Consumer Reports - that Honda wanted to increase their margin and decided to start using cheaper (and less reliable) parts in their engines.

Now it comes to Pizza Hut. I really like Pizza Hut Thin Crust pizza. Sure, we can get cheaper pizza from Domino’s, Papa Johns, and the like, but it just isn’t the same quality. Anyway, we were in an unfamiliar town and in need of a quantity of pizza and saw the ad for $5 pizza’s from Pizza Hut.
We got tooken.
It seems the pizza’s that are $5 apiece are ’special’ pizzas, indeed. They used an unfamiliar crust (you could not choose Pan or Thin), the sauce tasted different, and there was hardly any cheese. Quite frankly, I thought they were awful.

I most certainly can understand a company trying to make a little more money or widen their market, but what is the use of building up a brand name and then trashing that name?