Your perceived intelligence drops dramatically with each post you put up.
Even though people know its a "gio" it still "tarnishes" the name of the ibanez as a fine quality instrument. Most kids get squiers and tell their friends they have a "stratocaster" which, technically, they do. But no serious musicians would be caught dead with one. Fender keeps up their "high quality" name with only producing "top end" instruments. With the induction of squier, I feel they need to get rid of their MIM models all together.
Its a business strategy. How many older guitarists are quick to judge ibanez as a cheap brand for kids? too many. I didnt buy my first ibanez because I was after the name. Jackson, charvel, peavey... all make similar instruments. I picked it up because I liked it the best.
Exellent point. I'll again sound like a fanboy, but the great thing about Ibanez is that if you want to go top of the line, even at today's prices, you're only going to spend up to $1,800 or so or maybe less. Yeah, a lot of it is my personaly preference, but I'd take an RG3570 for $1,800 before shelling out $2,500+ for a Les Paul.
And I don't see my Indo's as being that much inferior; moreso that they have different character.
Lots of ibanez's cost more then 1800....
Ibanez probably has a commercial development director or an operations director or someone else who's got qualifications and experience and hard sales figures to base his decisions on. They've more than likely looked at the business models, decided where to place the company withinthe market, run projections and after careful consideration decided to emply the strategy they currently employ based on the metrics and parameters they chose to measure the market.
They tried idea of a low end brand, the "EX by Ibanez" in the 90s and phased that idea out quite quickly.
While I agree, they probably know their business better then i do (said in jest!), Im speaking more for reputation and brand image then hard numbers. Look at it like this... How many people have skipped over the hyundais because of "eww, its a hyundai!". It has one of the best made, highest rated cars in the industry (genesis sedan) and is passed over by more expensive, lower quality cars (bmw's) simply for the fact they want that "BMW" badge on their car. I didnt know they tried this already though!
EDIT: how about this for an idea... splitting the submodels up! Instead of "RG 350" vs "RG 570"... split those models. Let the RG's be RG's, and let the cheaper korean models be called something else? Gio is a good example of that. Make "higher end" gio's, instead of "lower end" RG's???