All Marketers...
Hershey Foods has changed its name
Now they want to be called just plain Hershey.
Why?
Well, they’ve spent years selling off their food divisions, leaving them with mostly junk… candy and stuff.
It turns out that people NEED food, and they WANT candy. So candy is a lot more profitable. Since Hershey no longer sells food, they want to be sure the stock market knows this. Hershey Junk is probably not a good name for a company, so now it’s just Hershey.
Let’s assume that they’re correct, and that the stock market will get the message, giving them a higher PE ratio and stock price because they are in a higher margin business. What this means is that a story about what they do will end up being worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Just to tell a story to people who have an incentive to be informed about the truth. Of course, it’s impossible to tell the truth…