The Death of Good Will
2nd July 2023
In accounting we have a thing called Good Will. That’s an intangible asset. Take a company with a super well established name and track record. There’s no physical asset for the name, Coke a Cola or McDonald’s, but there’s an asset value for how incredibly well known those are, and that needs to get accounted for in the valuation. Companies like that aren’t valuable just because they own stores or factories or lots of inventory, but because everybody knows who they are. Basically Good Will exists because customers know who you are, what you do, and generally like that. With big corporations, Good Will is worth billions.
Good Will goes down when companies turn off those customers, or the name starts to have negative connotations and they become less valuable (Anhauser Busch for a recent example).
The Star Wars novels are a perfect example of this. That was once the biggest and most beloved IP on Earth. Novels in that setting should be a license to print money. The Good Will was off the charts. A reboot was a chance to kinda forget the worst of previous products, and come out the gate strong with quality products. In a sane world, the novels of an IP that big should crush the rest of us by orders of magnitude, just off of name recognition and customers being inclined toward checking out products from that brand.
Nope. They went the opposite direction.