Thread by @ErrataRob

So "Daimler" has officially renamed itself "Mercedes-Benz", which comes as a surprise to most Americans who assumed that was the name of the company to begin with.

Daimler and Benz were two German automakers from the 1800s that merged at the start of the 1900s (Daimler-Benz). That was the company name. They made a popular car called the "Mercedes", named after a partner's daughter.

The auto industry was this tiny niche thing making toys for rich people and racing machines. The "Mercedes" car was one of the first true cars, rather than a horseless carriage with a motor replacing a horse.

The car brand was more famous than the company brand, so by the time it came to import cars to America, they simply called it American subsidiary "Mercedes-Benz". I think most all countries know it as Mercedes-Benz.

Other products, like trucks, weren't called Mercedes. Last year, Daimler split off the truck division as "Daimler Trucks" leaving the car division behind, which renamed itself "Mercedes-Benz", even inside Germany.

I'm fascinated by car company brand names. For one thing, they come from a time when the car industry looked nothing like how it looks today, with 99% of brand names from early times disappearing. For another thing, brand names are really unrelated to what the cars actually are.

I figure it tells the future of what brand names for high-tech/Internet companies will look like 50 years from now, such as buying brain implants from the Pfizer-Tesla corporation, or flying to Australia on a Amazon-Monsanto ramjet.

BTW, "branding" is social engineering. Customers don't spend many brain cells thinking about your product, so you have to maximize the small amount of attention they give you to repeat brand messages.

For example, Tesla. Instead of trying to produce an electric car (which everyone else was doing), Musk first produced a premium brand. Produce cool stuff nobody can afford first, generating a decade's worth of branding, before producing the Tesla Model 3 mass market car.

Companies really don't have technical advantages. They are pulling from the same pool of suppliers, hiring from the same pool of employees, and so on. The real only sustainable unfair advantage they can have over competitors is branding.

Often when companies merge, one has a stronger brand, but the other the stronger business. Business continuity is actually the stronger business -- but brand continuity is the stronger brand.