Zipf's law says don't split your brand

Thinking about breaking your growing product into multiple brands? Gerard's advice: probably don't, and the reason is Zipf's law. Zipf studied word frequency in English and found a power curve: the most common word appears twice as often as the second, which appears twice as often as the third, and so on. The same curve shows up across business, including how people click Google ads: the top listing draws roughly twice the clicks of the second. Brand power follows the curve too. Split one brand into two and each half slides down the curve, so the combined business the two brands generate is less than the single brand produced. A top-ranked brand broken in two can land seventh, tenth, eleventh: the second page of Google, where nobody looks. The biggest brands, Nike, Google, Coca-Cola, keep building products around one protected core brand. Small businesses fragment what little power they have. As a general rule, consolidate.