Why do manufacturers commercialize their products under two different marks?

Answer 1

There are several reasons. Sometimes Company A will buy Company B because Company B's product is good. They'll maintain Company B's mark because people were buying the stuff before, right? An example is Maytag--they make appliances. Whirlpool owns them now, but they still make Maytag appliances. Sometimes Company A will make something really nice. If the company has thrived on more utilitarian products, they might brand the nice stuff differently. The Japanese Big Three all introduced more-upscale cars--Honda sells Acura, Toyota sells Lexus and Nissan sells Infiniti. If you want to see why this is important, look at the Volkswagen Phaeton, which sold a little over 2000 examples in the two years they sold it in the US. Part of this is it was a $150,000 car, for which there's not much of a market. A bigger part of the reason is that if an American is going to buy a $150,000 car, it won't say Volkswagen on it. If they would have called it just a Phaeton, it would have sold better--it's a NICE car. Or sometimes they just have different names geographically--Hellman's mayonnaise is called Best Foods on the west coast.