I would go as far as call it false advertising. Especially when 10 brands are created that actually contain the same product.

Even more, the mere fact that this merger is sought after shows that there is actually need to divide both companies.

I disagree that branding the same product differently is false advertising. As long as the product lives up to the claims made in each case, I don't see what is false. I think you are trying to elevate what you think is important (being made by a small company) to a category that is given special treatment when it comes to advertising. It's like the equivalent of mandatory GMO labeling, but with GMO replaced by being made by a big company.

For legitimate reasons to have the same product with different brands, consider programming languages. If Haskell had a fancy web 2.0 website, some people might go there and think "this is probably a stable, production ready language with good documentation". Others might think "this language has probably made too many compromises with the corporate world, and won't be a principled and elegant language". If it was possible to market the language in both ways to both people, wouldn't that be reasonable? Namely, to let the corporate users know that it is production ready, and let the purists know that it is not corporate bloatware?

>Even more, the mere fact that this merger is sought after shows that there is actually need to divide both companies.

I don't understand this point, can you explain it?

Exactly. You get the point. This should be used to reduce the impression of false diversity.

Edit:

Lets expand this example even further. Lets say that there is company X with one baby formula and company Y with another baby formula. Company X has created 9 different brands to sell its baby formula but company Y has only one.

For a customer of baby formulas it would create an impression that there is wide diversity of baby formulas when in fact there are only two.

You are asking what is wrong with lying. How should I answer to this?

Lets imagine that there are group of customers of Z who buy product W only because they oppose to the company X.

When now company X creates a product A and tries to make impression that product A is from company B and not from company X, then they are making false claims to reduce the market share of company Z by making group of customers of Z to believe that product A is not from company X and is a fair alternative to the product W.

Second point. I am just supporting more actual competition on the market.

Though we have managed to produce quite a few world-class breweries. I'm fortunate to have Founders just a short walk away from my office.

There are many people out there who have heard about the craft beer revolution, don't know any better and will grab the first thing they see. Sure, if they like the product that's AOK. But the effect is that would have been money going to one of the smaller breweries. What do we think will happen once those breweries are extinguished?

I agree that the original piece seems overblown. In my experience, even the "craft brands" of the big brewers cater to pretty mass market tastes and aren't really that interesting.

Along w/ your last sentence I'd also say that most craft brewers' flagships can be pretty plain jane as well for the same reason.

It's also stupid: "those business practices" will do more to help craft brewers than it will to harm them.