At the core is a more fundamental principle at play: reputation. The law just tries to honor this one way or another.

Reputation is a core concept in building trust in human relations, that we have subconsciously transferred to brands.

Since the dawn of time, both humans and brands are trying to fake their reputation. For instance in the old days, when communication wasn't as fast, con artists used to travel a lot, allowing them to start over after ruining their reputation.

I think for many of us it gives an innate sense of disgust because it goes agains the core of human relationships.

Exactly this. This is the same as the reason to be concerned about counterfeit products — the seller has nothing to lose if the product is dangerous or substandard, since the reputation damage happens to someone else.

Brands used to put “Established 1850” or whatever on their packaging. Now old brands aren’t respected by most consumers who are looking for that new thing they saw on an Instagram ad or learned from a YouTuber

Most brands trashed their own reputations on purpose. For any given brand, I don't know whether I'm getting their solid 2000s quality products, or their now shitty 2020s quality products.

That has happened a lot, but the gp is also correct, there are quality products that are inexpensive simply because they have been around forever, so people think they are boring or outdated. There are some really good deals on spirits for instance, that simply aren't popular, but have always been high quality. Eventually someone writes an article about it and they either raise the price, or it is unobtainable.

Perhaps legally, these nitpicks are valid. Lawyers are nitpicky types. "Deception" defined in a legally functional way, tends to see things differently to average people using common sense.

I agree with the parent, there is a lot of similarity here. You may be right that cloud kitchens are more haphazard and veer into challengeable trademark infringement. Old giants like Unilever tend to be better at legal precision.

Besides that, they're both doing the same thing. They're using brands to obfuscate, artificially manage reputation, or achieve basic marketing goals... not tell consumers who they are buying from. It's all deceptive. Fake choice, fake competition, fake diversity. It's all abusive of trademarks. Trademarks are intended to help consumers know what they're buying, create some reputational accountability. Typical FMCG strategies, like unilever and these cloud kitchens, are all about neutralising this... allow them to enjoy positive reputation while neutralising the negative reputation.

All of this is standard strategy, used often. For example. You are going for a "normal" supermarket experience: Many options for cereal, cheese, detergent, etc. Choice. But, you still want 70% cereal market share to go to vendor A. Maybe it's an internal vendor. So, fake branding. Fake diversity. Create the experience without creating the experience.

As Cloud restaurants become a mature, they'll probably learn to avoid legal trouble. But, the game will still be the game. It's not cheating if you're drunk.

The post, for example, wants to know which brands represent which kitchens. He doesn't want food from the bad kitchens. Tightening up trademark infringement will not help him.

Exactly! Some companies use their brand to differentiate their good qualities from their competition, but other companies use thousands of brands to hide themselves, obfuscate, and confuse customers. If someone publicized that they found rat poison in one of Nestle's products, Nestle would rather people just stop buying that brand and not boycott its entire portfolio of brands. That's obfuscation and deception.

You can find thousands of comments of the form “This is no different from…” which exhibit temporary amnesia about the devil in the details. It’s hard to know if something is a harmless analogue of something else. And too often the precedent isn’t even a good precedent.

>1. Similar sounding names to existing brand is trademark infringement. Here this particular entity is deliberately copying the restaurant names to mislead people into selecting them (when original restaurants are closed).

Can you define that difference? Wingstop and Thighstop for instance are incredibly close and not enough to trigger regulatory enforcement. There is the side note that they are owned by the same entity, but do regulators know that for a fact before they decide no to enforce penalties for what you are claiming is trademark infringement?

>2. Assumption is Unilever creates different brands with same exacting manufacturing standards, and it stands behind them (packages will follow federal labeling guidelines). It is for A/B testing of brand collaterals (name, packaging graphics, colors, copy etc.). Here obviously that is not the case.

> Assumption is Unilever creates different brands with same exacting manufacturing standards...

Where did this assumption come from? That's a claim without any backing as far as I am aware. Do you honestly believe they only make different brands because they are testing how the sound of the brands name affects sales? Nothing around compartmentalizing the risk of them causing some backlash by cutting corners or getting people ill, and the ability to just cut off that one brand rather than their entire product line?

>It is very obvious that deception is the end goal, so really don't understand "why not" remark.

It is literally the opposite to me. It feels like deception is the main goal unless they make the "Product of X Conglomerate" a larger part of the packaging than the brands label, and not the minimum size required by law, or if its legally allowed, omitted entirely from the label

I don’t understand your point about Wingstop and Thighstop at all. Of course a company is allowed to “infringe” on its own trademark — in quotes because that’s not actually infringement at all. How do you know for sure it wouldn’t be enforceable if a separate restaurant had been called Thighstop?

If they decide not to pursue action due to infringement then I'd argue they're not really separate entities at all so why have them in the first place. In which case, they're performing some sort of fraud. These things are usually illegal in the context of tax-evasion ("oh he's my nephew and I give him a company car, and full-salary for 'consulting' once a month.")

There isn’t any fraud here. It’s all very normal corporate structure.

Yum! Brands owns both, and Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC, etc. The restaurants themselves are owned by franchisees who license the trademarks (and all kind of complicated buy-in and standards).

Yum! Brands made ThighStop to address the wing shortage and keep the association/credibility. It’s actually weirdly transparent: just like WingStop, but thighs. I don’t know if WingStop franchisees got automatic rights to that brand or not. My guess is that it was just a way to keep them afloat.

Now, the fact that WingStop has any cred is gross. I can get better wings from a mom & pop or local chain at any strip mall, or heck, a gas station than wing chains like them, BWW, etc.

I guess America outside the South and Buffalo, NY doesn’t have access to wings that don’t taste like a salt lick. It’s a tragedy.

As a couple nitpicky points:

As far as I know -- and I've double-checked this just now -- Yum Brands does not own Wingstop (which doesn't capitalize the "s", even though we all do it automatically). They own "Wing Street", which is a sub-brand of Pizza Hut. Wingstop is an independent publicly-traded company.

Wingstop created Thighstop as a "digital brand" -- essentially, a ghost kitchen run out of existing Wingstop locations. This is a trick that a lot of chain restaurants started doing since the pandemic. Denny's runs "The Meltdown" as a sandwich shop; Chili's runs "Wings & Things"; you can find others. You can only order from "Thighstop" online, but you can add a thigh to combos when you order from Wingstop if you're so inclined.

(And I have not lived in Buffalo, New York, but I have lived in the South -- and California -- and can assure you there are many "mom and pop" wing shops and local chains that…aren't great.)

Bah! You're totally right and I'm wrong. I flipped them in my head. Thank you for the correction.

Definitely some are not great, I can name 3 within a mile of me I won't go to. And some are "sketchy" but delicious. But that also applies to barbecue, mexican, catfish, etc. around me. Just look where the locals go. If there's a line at an unexpected place, it's probably good. But if it's around a college campus, it may just be cheap :).

>I guess America outside the South and Buffalo, NY doesn’t have access to wings that don’t taste like a salt lick. It’s a tragedy.

Or you make them at home. Which is very straightforward.

There were literally ads on TV by Wingstop talking about rebranding to Thighstop: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nTx4YuMa3cQ

This is no more fraudulent or shady than Apple having a brand called “MacBook Pro” and another one called “MacBook Air”.

It's not fraud, it's pretty clear marketing. When there was a shortage of wings, they stopped selling those and started selling thighs. Thus, Thighstop. This has literally nothing to do with tax evasion - you really are not understanding what they're doing at all.

> If they decide not to pursue action due to infringement

This is kind of a bizarre thing to say... they are the same company, so there is just not universe in which Wingstop would sue itself.

Thighstop seems to exist because Wingstop is/was having a chicken wing shortage.

There is nothing wrong with one business running two brands to sell two different products.

>do regulators know that for a fact before they decide no to enforce penalties for what you are claiming is trademark infringement?

The regulator doesn't pursue trademark infringement cases. It is upon the trademark holder to defend their mark via proceedings. So WingstopCo would bring an action against ThighstopCo. In this case, since both marks are held by the same entity, there's no enforcement possible unless the holding entity an exclusive license to one of the marks to another party.

> do regulators know that for a fact before they decide no to enforce penalties for what you are claiming is trademark infringement?

I've been told that trademark proceedings have to be initiated by the holder, and that the holder failing to do so is how certain phrases can become common names for a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...

But IANAL.

Too argumentative.. but would try to answer some.

> Can you define that difference? Wingstop and Thighstop for instance are incredibly close..

The author of the blog clearly identified the modus operandi. He makes a very compelling case (he obviously understand the local context, can intuit things based upon the fuzzy dataset which is result of his experiencing the system over time.. etc.).

> Where did this assumption come from? (Unilever has exacting manufacturing standards) That's a claim without any backing as far as I am aware..

The knowledge of how world works and is typically built if one is curious enough. https://www.unilever.com/news/news-search/2022/shining-a-lig...

> There is the side note that they are owned by the same entity, but do regulators know that for a fact before they decide no to enforce penalties for what you are claiming is trademark infringement?

Yes. Yes they do. Absolutely, 100%, regulators know that Wingstop and Thighstop are owned by the same entity. They know this from regulatory and administrative filings, and they know this from the advertising that could not possibly be more clear that these are the same company.

Here, Rick Ross can explain it to you in no uncertain terms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTx4YuMa3cQ

>Wingstop and Thighstop for instance are incredibly close and not enough to trigger regulatory enforcement. There is the side note that they are owned by the same entity, but do regulators know that for a fact before they decide no to enforce penalties for what you are claiming is trademark infringement?

Well, yes? Regulators would determine both are owned by the same entity, at which point there would be no enforcement penalty to apply.

Regulators don't even proactively enforce trademarks in the first place. The holder is responsible for bringing an action.

Well there you go.

> Can you define that difference? Wingstop and Thighstop for instance are incredibly close and not enough to trigger regulatory enforcement

I can define the difference clearly: "whatever a court decides"

The law is intentionally fuzzy, and in the case of trademark, it's whether the names are "likely to cause consumer confusion", which is an obviously fuzzy thing that cannot be encoded in a computer or with a set of string matching rules. Which is fine, our legal system has humans in it.

If the companies are doing so with the specific intent of causing consumer confusion, then it seems like the court would have a relatively easy time at showing that such an occurrence was likely.

What the court decides is different than “similar sounding names”.

My point was that similar sounding names are not automatically infringement because they need a court to decide that the similarity doesn’t matter. I explicitly pointed out two similar sounding restaurant names owned by the same entity because either they were assumed to be IP infringement until a court decided they were not, or courts didn’t get involved by default for similar sounding names.

The whole point was to make a reductio ab absurdum argument that similarity of names did not matter in terms of IP until courts were involved, so bringing it up as a reason that ghost kitchens couldn’t make similar names a silly argument to make sans lawsuits

In this case a court wouldn't even get involved. One of the brands needs to sue the other one.

Results are the same. Spamming mental space of a consumer so that no matter what he buys he buys from them, but has illusion of choice.

>Unilever creates different brands with same exacting manufacturing standards

They absolutely don’t. Given brand of laundry detergents can be quite different between neighboring Poland and Germany, with the only visible difference being the set of languages on the label.

what unilever is doing is segmenting the market, and filling each segment with a product offering. cloud kitchens are trying to do the same, but the issue is they're not segmenting on quality at all because they're fundamentally pursuing a (lower) cost strategy. you can't differentiate on quality if you have thin margins, as implied by the cost strategy. they're primarily segmenting on (a select subset) of cuisines, which doesn't get you as far as you might think in such a competitive market as prepared food delivery.