With Hogan joining TNA, in his words, to take over and run things, there has been a lot of chatter on the Internet as to what it means for the company in its struggles to provide honest-to-goodness competition to the WWE as market leader. While the decision is questionable - Hogan and Eric Bischoff both saw WCW, a successful company with lots of financial backing, sink and fail under their partial watch - it still carries hope as the combo was a big reason why WCW was able to beat the WWF in the late '90s for the weeks that it was on top.
Everyone knows what BiscHogan needs to do to get to that point. They need to create an identity that is unique and not a copycat of the WWE's current model. Competition arises when two or more companies try to gain a majority share of the market using different approaches. For example, the cola market is being competed in mainly by Pepsi and Coca-Cola. They both make colas, but Coke's formula is based off a heavy syrup, while Pepsi's formula is lighter and based more off straight cane sugar. In the '90s, the WWF was Pepsi and WCW Coke.
Now, imagine that at some point, Coke goes out of business and a new competitor arises to fill its void. A new company comes in looking to fill the void left by Coke's departure, but instead of coming in with a new formula or even a new twist on Coke's old formula, they ape Pepsi's formula almost to a tee. Then, they start hiring Pepsi's former employees to make it and their former ad reps to come up with the campaigns that are eerily similar to old Pepsi commercials and often keep Pepsi in their mouths. Now, I'm not an expert in marketing, but to me, that sounds like a recipe for failure. If you're going to have that strategy, your cola had better execute on the Pepsi formula exceptionally well, much better than Pepsi does and even then, Pepsi has the history, the name cache and the brand loyalty that will make it hard for a copycat to get over and really succeed in a market they dominate.
So, if it sounds ass-tarded for a cola company to follow that business model, what does it say for a wrestling company, especially one that doesn't really need to reinvent the wheel in order to fill a market need. All they need to do is to give the people who liked WCW something similar to what their demand would dictate. No, I don't mean bait-and-switch and false grandeur, but on the old-school wrestling-based storytelling and top heel model that JCP and later WCW utilized to become competitors to the WWF.
All the while, people including myself have been saying that TNA needs to push a bigtime hero as the big face for the company when the answer is right there. WCW and JCP always hit it big with having the heels be the dominant Champions while the faces chasing them were interchangeable, always different to the hero model of the WWF/E fending off multiple heel challengers in successive months. The WWF/E had Sammartino, Hogan, Hart, Michaels, Austin and Cena, whereas at its most successful, WCW had Flair, the Horsemen, Sullivan, Vader and the nWo. Sting and Luger were never the big stars that they could have been, and by the same token, Rude, Perfect and Undertaker would have been monsters had they been in a promotion where the heel was king.
So in a way, Sting's passing of the torch to AJ Styles is a propos, or at least it should be. Sting was forever playing the plucky underdog, the guy who'd always rise up to defeat the heel menace, whether it was Flair or the nWo. Whether he succeeded or not... well, we can chalk that up to bad booking. Regardless, Styles would be better served to be a main event stopgap, a vanquisher rather than a superman.
With BiscHogan coming in, you'd hope that TNA sees this as a way to resurrect the WCW mentality without making the same mistakes. Sadly, from what I'm seeing on PWSpyware's Twitter feed, Hogan is looking to bring in his cronies and more WWE retreads. Ugh. Still, PWS's feed distributes news from the Site That Shall Not Be Linked, so maybe they got their news wrong or are just making shit up.
Regardless, TNA has the pieces in place. They have credible dominant-type heels like Angle and Samoa Joe. They have plucky, rootable faces in Styles and Hernandez. The pieces are in place. It's just that they need to learn from the mistakes of failures past and get rid of those that would perpetrate the WWE-imitator mentality (i.e. Vince Russo).
Sadly, I don't have the faith that they will. It's nice to dream though.
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