By: S.P. Dinnen, Register Business Writer

May 10, 2006, Des Moines Register

Whirlpool Corp. investors gave a collective shrug today to cost-cutting measures announced for its Maytag subsidiary, sending the appliance maker’s shares down 93 cents each in late morning trading.

Shares of the Michigan-based owner of Maytag fell 93 cents each, to $92.16. That’s nearly $4 a share less than the $96 high that they reached on March 29. But it’s 32 percent higher than their price on July 15, 2005, the last trading day before Whirlpool offered to buy Maytag.

Investors can bid a company’s stock up or down depending on their measure of the expected impact of consolidations or plant closings. While cost cutting steps such as staff cuts generally are seen as positive for the bottom line, investor sentiment can sometimes be negative if it doesn’t see the changes as broad enough.

From a marketing perspective, Tim Calkins, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University, said it’s way too early to tell whether Whirlpool’s decision to cut 4,500 Maytag-related jobs dooms the storied Iowa appliance.

However, he said that it’s very difficult for companies to manage multiple brands at the same time, especially when there’s not much difference between those brands.

“Maytag is a fine brand,” Calkins said. “It’s not a particularly differentiated brand.”

Corporate America has long wrestled with such problems, Calkins said. General Motors Corp., for instance, shuttered its Oldsmobile brand in 2004.