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Comment by lotyrin | Hacker News Reader

You absolutely can still grade commodities. A discerning distributor who has discerning retailers who have discerning consumers has plenty of incentives not to comingle inferior material into his shipments.

The fact that consumers aren't very discerning is exactly created by brands -- they have learned to discern based on identity instead of by quality, because brand recognition is less effort than material inspection.

Additionally, a brand certainly does not provide the attachment to consequence that you claim, once a brand has consumers' loyalty and a sizable market share it can adjust quality with relative impunity.

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Toilet paper. Buy the cheap stuff and compare to the high end brands. Worlds of difference.

What point does this make that addresses mine?

Of course there are different qualities of toilet paper. In a commodity-style market for toilet paper there would be competition on both price and on quality axes and there would likely be multiple points of equilibrium between quality and price.

I think the point is that, in the opinion of many people, the basic, stupid strategy of walking to the toilet paper aisle and buying the first thing that matches something you saw on TV actually works in terms of getting a pretty OK objective quality instance of the product pretty much all the time pretty much anywhere you go, for a ton of different household products and commodities.

People choose to differentiate by superficial brand identity specifically because it creates the experience they want: reproducible access to consistently acceptable quality.

Which actually doesn't work when buying a car, because some premium car brands are notoriously unreliable, prone to basic manufacturing defects, expensive to run, and inefficient.

Their only selling point is a certain mid-market bling. No one making a rational decision would ever buy one.

But this is basic US MBA strategy. Cut corners on tangibles, replace them with hype and marketing bullshit targeted at a specific demographic, then leverage The Brand™ to charge the highest possible prices.

Use both formal traditional advertising and informal online astroturfing to maintain the illusion of value.

It's called marketing, but in reality it's industrial-scale behaviour modification.

One of the great selling points of the low-end Yugo was that it had a defroster on the back windshield, to warm your hands while you pushed it.

First heard that joke in the 80s, only it was for Lada

Less than the "price differential" difference. And artificially created - not because of real extra cost needed to make it better, but for market differentiation. So that the same manufacturer, under two brand names, can sell to the poor and the middle/upper class at different prices.

> The fact that consumers aren't very discerning is exactly created by brands

But we use a lot of different manufactured goods in our daily lives today, many manufactured in ways that require expert knowledge to appraise. It's unreasonable to ask for the average person to be well-versed in them all.

Being well-versed in the products they sell is the role the shopkeeper used to have.

Hey, a discerning distributor builds a brand around its being discerning. This may be entirely organic, because reputation accretes all by itself, through merely doing transactions with enough customers.

Costco.

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