Branding 101
This kind of marketing happens all the time, if you look at restaurants, how many of them are owned by the same person or companies? Like Wendy's who owns Tim Horton's. I think they also own KFC, and Taco Bell? This is all about Branding. Sometimes it is a local thing, if you looked at everything you purchase you would notice a great deal of companies own multiple brands. Maybe the easiest to explain is in automobiles. You pick any car maker, and the bigger ones, have multiply brands, not only different models. Honda-Acura, Toyota-Lexus, the US makers are even more famous for this. When you go to a Loblaws, or IGA, you will sometimes see, the name of the company that made the product for another. Look at bread, you can see who made the bread many times. Why do companies do this? It's about expanding their market, and reaching a customer at a different price point, everyone wants to increase their market share.
Future Shop, has commission sales staff, and Best Buy does not, and what I love about these shops is the price guarantee. It's a marketing thing. When a buyer buys a product he asks for exclusive, so he can put it ant any price, nobody will beat it. The retailer company who wants the same product, and also wants exclusive, well the manufacturer will make it, but may have to chance the color, or something small, and then they will have a different product code so you that they are different. It's actually funny to try and compare. By having many brands, this makes it very hard to keep track.
Now in the SP world, I think there is also something about being "new", which may help generate some business, and could it be to loose a bad image? If a visitor to Montreal picks up a phone book, and randomly picks an add, the owner of the SP agency has a better chance of getting that phone call the more numbers/ads he/she has, like playing the lottery.
