I'd go further and say that branding is now often the product itself.
Nike can sell a hat for 20X more than a generic hat when it has their swoosh on it. Perfume is basically a generic chemical wrapped in a huge amount of marketing. Apple makes excellent products, but there's no question that at least part of the premium you pay is not for better quality, but for the brand itself.
While the value of a brand often revolves around vanity and advertising, there are often other factors that are also not directly linked to product quality: such as "fair trade" coffee, buy-one-donate-one shoes, or humanely raised animals for food.
We're moving from a pure "consumer society" into something a bit different (but definitely still consumption based), where consumption is not just for the direct benefit of the consumer, but is also used to signal deeply held values.
A acquaintance of mine recently told me he was going to start his own rock climbing clothes brand.
Naively, I though he was trying to make well designed clothes for rock climbers. As a geek, I though he was trying to solve a problem.
No. He just bought Chinese low quality t-shirts, and sticked logos on that and spent all his energy developing the brand itself: communication, aesthetic, mentality, target, etc.
I couldn't see the value of doing such thing, since we have enough of this crap. But it worked: friends around me started to wear the damn thing.
It makes me so uneasy, but it's a good lesson on how humans work.
It works both ways. If I know that a company is basically selling Chinese t-shirts with their logo and their markup price, might as well just buy directly from China and skip the middleman.
> It makes me so uneasy, but it's a good lesson on how humans work.
It's an even better lesson on how business is "taught" vs. how business is done. Everyone on HN, at business school, or wherever will tell you that you should start a business to "solve problems" or "fill a gap in the market".
The majority of the people actually starting businesses are doing so to make a buck. That's it. if you're starting out, you'll learn more about selling from starting a business providing a me-too substitute good in a crowded market than you will trying to build a completely new product segment with no market validation and no established price points.
“Moving from”? That happened decades ago, before e-commerce became significant. This sounds like the kind of thing discussed in No Logo, which was published in 1999.
> “Moving from”? That happened decades ago, before e-commerce became significant.
Yes, absolutely, since the invention of brands, at least some brands were the product rather than a signifier of quality.
However, in the last 10-20 years, largely due to globalization, high quality goods have become widely available. Before, that Nike hat may well have been much higher quality than the generic, but now they are indistinguishable. As overall product quality has improved, the only thing left to sell is the brand itself.
I'd go further and say that branding is now often the product itself.
Nike can sell a hat for 20X more than a generic hat when it has their swoosh on it. Perfume is basically a generic chemical wrapped in a huge amount of marketing. Apple makes excellent products, but there's no question that at least part of the premium you pay is not for better quality, but for the brand itself.
While the value of a brand often revolves around vanity and advertising, there are often other factors that are also not directly linked to product quality: such as "fair trade" coffee, buy-one-donate-one shoes, or humanely raised animals for food.
We're moving from a pure "consumer society" into something a bit different (but definitely still consumption based), where consumption is not just for the direct benefit of the consumer, but is also used to signal deeply held values.