The promised discourse

[substitute]

There's an idea of business that I'll call the Romantic Ideal; it's what we Americans are taught in school. Someone has an idea for a new or improved product or service, a "better mouse trap" as we call it in slang. Our hero scares up some money, builds a small business, and through hard work and attention to quality the business grows. Eventually, if the price is right and the quality is good, everyone prospers, the company goes public, and we all benefit.

This has indeed happened many times. However, the current pattern is different. Our hero is now a marketing professional, a "brand manager". Brought in at the above company 20 years later, he sees that they have become known for their quality product, and that people in many places trust their name. He then proceeds to apply something called "Brand Extension" in which the famous name is attached to hundreds of other items, licensed to other people, and in general spread around as liberally as possible.

This allows our new hero to charge a marginally higher amount for all of these items, because the good name of the original company justifies it. However, there is nothing necessarily good about the stuff they're now selling. In fact, the cheaper the better, to maximize this new margin.

The result is that the world is loaded up with crap with a good brand name on it. To give a good example: The Land Rover Defender was the vehicle of choice if you needed to drive the length of Africa. Twice. Backwards. It was amazingly tough and resilient. Pricy to be sure, but this little truck over the last few decades became a synonym for "off road vehicle for remote nasty environments".

The next one will be a rebranded Ford Explorer. This is a car that is fun and ok to go to the market in, if you don't mind several safety recalls per model year and tacky, downmarket switchgear, and a crap suspension. It's a box for consumers. But all you have to do is pin that Land Rover badge on it and PROFITS! occur.

I submit that this is bad for business and bad for our culture. Not only will the pyramid collapse at some point (hopefully imprisoning the marketers), but a lot of our ideas about "quality" are tied up in commercial brands, and having them all despoiled for a few bucks can't be good.

In any case it pisses me off.

List of examples:

• Steinway pianos
  
• Fender guitars
  
• Mercedes-Benz cars
  
• Gucci
  
• Van De Kamp's Bakery (here in CA)
  
• Every chain restaurant, ever
  
• The Kennedy Family
  

Comments

[frobisher.livejournal.com]

I actually find the fact that Guild is now made by Fender to be somewhat more worrying, since Fender makes really crappy acoustics.

But the guitar thing has been a crapshoot for at least 20 years. I got my Telecaster in '83. People poo-pooh'd me for not trying to get a Pre-CBS Fender. You know what? It's a really good guitar. I tried a bunch and found one I liked. Mind you, this is ages before they started having the low end ones made in Japan and (IMO of worse quality, overall) Mexico.

You can still get a good fender, but you have to look for it. And I get the impression that going for the "main line" version rather than the "brand extension" version isn't as much help as one would hope. I know a lot of people who prefer (and get a much better deal) by getting a japanese model that feels good and just replacing some of the hardware and pickups.

And, frankly, the Kennedy name has pretty much always been kind of inflated beyond its actual quality.

Hm. when's the next guitar show...

[flipzagging.livejournal.com]

Nothing new here. Pilgrims in the Middle Ages bought Holy Land tchotchkes for the folks back home, didn't they? So authentic.

Come to think of it, the Catholic Church is the ultimate in brand extension. They have a good logo, I hear.

[uninvention.livejournal.com]

you prophesize that "the pyramid [will] collapse at some point." you neglect the fact that people are stupid.

not to imply that i'm not part of or trying to be part of The Herd.

Quality is Monkey One

[stimps.livejournal.com]

While I found some parts of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance painful (like most books that try to squash any school of thought or culture into one easy to digest form), I found the discussions of Quality to be really good.

My biggest fear is that the present dilution of quality will make people totally unable to detect it anymore. The most obvious example I can think of is buying food. I remember when our supermarket used to sell food, and you had to go in and buy it with an eye for how you were going to put it together. Now it's all split up into Meal Sections, with the most popular/least fulfilling/most expensive at eye level. If you want to just buy ingredients, you have to hunt through the crap. The Prepared Pasta Sauce section is bigger than the Dried Beans section. I think we both know people who believe that Processed Cheese is the way it comes out of the cow. Our friend Tim is always shocked when I make food for him ... "Hey, this tastes way better than Brand X." "Uhhh, that's because I actually cooked it, tasted it, added things that it needed when it needed them." "WOW YOU CAN DO THAT?!" Sigh.

It wouldn't frustrate me so much if most people didn't seem to be so willing to roll over and accept Crap. Bad books, bad movies, bad food. "Don't complain, just suck it up, maybe it's a phase" and then eventually you're ordering the Kraft Foods Number Three, Sam Lowry.

Slurm Brand Pizza/Socks/Looseleaf. For all your household needs. Blurf.