Brand split question

By Scott Keith on 20 January 2017

Hi Scott,

Seeing as we’re (sort of) approaching the 15th anniversary of the brand split I’d like to ask a few questions:

1. Did you think it was a good idea in the first place ?

2. Do you think overall it can be classed as successful from a business and creative perspective ?

3. Is there anything they could/should have done differently ?

1. Yes and no. It was a clever idea to generate competition due to the death of WCW and ECW, but the roster just wasn’t deep enough to support a proper split in the long run.

2. No to both. It essentially gutted and destroyed Smackdown as a viable brand, turning the Smackdown house shows into glorified B-shows and oversaturating the product with titles. By the time John Cena and Randy Orton merged the belts, the "World title" was about as valuable as the toy belt replicas they sold on WWE.com. So of course they repeated both mistakes this time.

3. Yup, they should have stayed true to the vision of ONE CHAMPION for both brands. Ditto for the tag champions. Also, making JBL champion for a year really didn’t help, either.