It occurs to me that a close equivalent to what Trump has done — and it is not perfectly equivalent, as I will detail, but it’s comparable — is the Martha Stewart brand.
You can find Martha Stewart’s name on hundreds of different products, some exclusively at certain retailers, others sold more broadly. There are knife sets, down jackets, coffee tables, pots and pans, pillowcases, and on and on. Martha Stewart herself does not have a manufacturing company which produces all these goods; the only real product she actively makes on her own is media, books and television. Instead, her model is to examine the marketplace for opportunities, and then she reaches out to an established manufacturer or retailer and offers a proposal. If accepted, this partner takes responsibility for physically producing the item(s), but Stewart’s company sets the design standard and, on approval, grants the partner the right to sell said item(s) using the Martha Stewart brand name, for a fee.
Example: When Stewart was developing her relationship with K-Mart, she suggested that a line of towels be offered under her name, with brighter and softer pastel colors in line with her brand identity. This would contrast with the darker colors K-Mart was already selling (supposedly because their market research showed that K-Mart customers liked a towel they didn’t have to wash as often). No Stewart entity would manufacture the towels and supply them to K-Mart; that was K-Mart’s responsibility. Stewart’s side of the deal was to define the parameters for the product’s design, and then give K-Mart permission to sell it under a name that carried built-in fame and cachet.
This is somewhat similar to the Trump model, in that Trump doesn’t build or manage the majority of the properties that carry (or used to carry) his name. His company contacts the owner of an existing property and asks if they’d be receptive to a re-brand, or the developer of a project in progress and asks if they’d like to use the Trump name when they launch.
Where the Martha Stewart brand is different, though, is found in a couple of factors. First, there are a lot of products, but they’re all very narrowly focused on a particular market niche, “home and lifestyle improvement aimed at the middle class.” Stewart is very careful never to stray outside the boundary of a highly focused identity. Trump, famously, didn’t limit himself to hotels and golf courses.
Second, Stewart takes an active role in maintaining those products after launch, to ensure the design is not changed or compromised over time and to monitor quality levels. It would be damaging to the brand if those K-Mart towels suddenly started bleeding their dyes all over the laundry, for example. In contrast, once Trump grants use of the name and collects his fee, he takes essentially no role in the operations of the properties carrying his brand.
So like I said, it’s not a perfect equivalence, but if you’re considering other examples of the same kind of thing Trump did, Martha Stewart has to be high on the list.
