Putting the Berkshire brand before Buffett

Surrounded by three beaming cheerleaders, Warren Buffett wears a white Oxford shirt emblazoned with the logo of his conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway. A $100-bill appears to peek out of his front pocket, but it's actually a replica embroidered onto the fabric.

"Is it the shirt or the man?" reads the ad for the Berkshire Hathaway Activewear Collection. "Sorry Warren, it's the shirt."

More than ever, Buffett is promoting the Berkshire Hathaway brand instead of himself, the billionaire investor. In a marked shift in marketing strategy, he is pushing the relatively unknown name of his holding company to attract customers to his numerous businesses.

When Buffett earlier this month announced that his company had an agreement to acquire the Van Tuyl Group, the nation's fifth-largest auto dealership by sales, he announced that it would be renamed Berkshire Hathaway Automotive. The move followed the rebranding of Buffett's energy companies, real estate brokerages and certain insurance holdings with the Berkshire Hathaway name.

The extension of the brand is more than a marketing tactic. At the age of 84, Buffett faces persistent questions over succession at his conglomerate, whose $336-billion stock market value makes it the country's fifth-largest company.

"This is really an effort to make the brand as recognisable as Buffett himself," said Greggory Warren, an analyst at Morningstar Research. "He expects the Berkshire brand to replace him longer term."

Buffett has been associated with the Berkshire name since 1962, when he began buying shares of Berkshire Hathaway, a struggling New England textile mill. He took control of the company a few years later and used it as an acquisition vehicle, buying up everything from homebuilders to carpet manufacturers to newspapers. Businesses under the Berkshire umbrella include the Dairy Queen fast-food chain, Fruit of the Loom clothing and Benjamin Moore paints. (The textile mill shut down in 1985.)

But now Wall Street analysts and Buffett's faithful investors are wondering who, or what, will define the company when Buffett is no longer in control.

And while Buffett has outlined a rough succession plan - it involves splitting his duties among a chief executive, a chief investment officer and a chairman - there is concern that Berkshire Hathaway's next leaders may not match his track record.

They certainly will not have anywhere near the stature and cachet of Buffett, who is known by nearly three-quarters of Americans, according to research by the Marketing Arm, a unit of Omnicom. More people aspire to be like him than they do President Obama or Oprah Winfrey, and he rivals the pop star Taylor Swift in setting trends, the research showed.

The Berkshire Hathaway name, however, has remained mostly in the shadows, confined largely to stock market tables and financial websites, or his famed annual shareholder letters.

©2014 The New York Times News Service