TO THE MAX!
How does diluting one brand for the sake of merging with another make any sense at all?
HBO Max and Discovery+ are merging soon. Which is fine and was to be expected after David Zaslav bought Warner Media from AT&T. It makes sense that he wanted to combine the two companies.
What doesn’t make sense if the new name. Now, I’m guessing you have heard of HBO. You’ve probably heard of Discovery as well. If you were going to merge those two streaming platforms into one which name would you guess has more weight? Which one would you want to lead with?
HBO Discovery+ seems clunky, but fine. HBO Max Discovery isn’t much better, but whatever it’s okay.
Of course, they didn’t go with either one of those choices. For reasons that confounded me they decided to go with….Max.
Now, I’m not some high paid consultant but if I had a strong brand name known for quality television like HBO I wouldn’t drop it altogether for…Max.
When I hear “Max” I think of a few things.
I think of The Max from Saved by the Bell (as you might have guessed from the photo I chose for this post)
Or Max Power from The Simpsons
Or Cinemax…which was always a lesser HBO.
Maybe this will be fine. Maybe the power of the prestige TV of HBO along with the house hunting thrills of Discovery will overpower this lackluster name for a streaming service.
However, if this analyst that spoke to The NY Times is right is just the dumbest reasoning as possible:
“Dropping HBO from the name is cementing that ‘we’re not just a home for premium programming,’” Ms. Alexander said. “‘We’re the home for anything you want to watch.’”
How does diluting one brand for the sake of merging with another make any sense at all? Also, if you take a gander over at the Disney/Hulu/ESPAN bundle you don’t have to take this route. You could have combined that them into a bundle.
I suppose this also signals a potential degradation of quality in HBO Shows. If they don’t appreciate what they have in the HBO brand what confidence should we have in them protecting it. Listen, I’ve said this before but in terms of prestige Apple TV+ has been gaining on HBO.
If you take anything from this post I hope it’s this - just because somebody with money tells you something is a good idea doesn’t make it so. Just because a consultant that you are paying a lot of money tells you something doesn’t make it so. Sometimes you should just talk to people.