Hacker News Reader

PR firms are so powerful now they can make any brand great again. See Microsoft. I guaranty there will be people that will want to answer this comment stating how they really are a good firm now. And cite great things they do. Yet I bet in 10 years, we will learn about some other horrible things they did. Again.

In rhetoric this is what's known as "inoculating the argument", or "inoculation theory". You take a reasonable criticism of what you've said and present a weakened version of what someone might respond with in order to suggest that means that response is invalid.

The thing is though, in this case, you've not really presented a solid argument. All you've said is "Microsoft might be doing terrible things!", which is potentially true, but it's a bad reason to ignore the obviously good things that we can see. What your argument boils down to is that once a company loses your trust they can never get it back regardless of what they do. In which case you're removing yourself from the conversation because you're only ever going to be negative.

Indeed, this is an opinion based on observations I made, not a scientific claim.

And as you noted, I designed it specifically so that my comment would not be inundated with answers from the accounts of PR firms paid to say MS is great.

You can now state that those could be real accounts, and that MS is really a great company and that it's just being defended by people that like it for real and I have no proof of what I advance.

And I have no way to contradict you.

I appreciate your logic. However, MS continues to do wrong, forced telemetry and upgrades, ads in the OS, are but a few examples. Only now drowned out.

>MS continues to do wrong, forced telemetry and upgrades, ads in the OS

These things might be unpreferable to you, but none of them are "wrong".

Something is only wrong from a business perspective if you lose customers (either from trust or legal means (probably in the EU))

"forced telemetry" is very wrong.

Let's see how long it takes until that is illegal in your country.

There are some people that think if something isn't illegal, then it isn't wrong. It's really weird.

Most people never get past Kohlberg Stage 4.

I had never heard of this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg%27s_stages_o...

From the wiki page, there are three levels that include 6 stages (two each):

        Level 1 (Pre-Conventional)

            1. Obedience and punishment orientation

                    (How can I avoid punishment?)

            2. Self-interest orientation

                    (What's in it for me?)
                    (Paying for a benefit)

        Level 2 (Conventional)

            3. Interpersonal accord and conformity

                    (Social norms)
                    (The good boy/girl attitude)

            4. Authority and social-order maintaining orientation

                    (Law and order morality)

        Level 3 (Post-Conventional)

            5. Social contract orientation
            6. Universal ethical principles

                    (Principled conscience)

It's substantially more common a viewpoint on here, at least anecdotally compared to my real life experience.

Microsoft continue to produce proprietary software, i.e. software which infringes on its users' freedoms to use, examine, modify & share software; that is wrong.

Are you suggesting that those users have no choice but to use that software?

Most users have no idea they have a choice, so... effectively, yes.

I think brand matters more than ever. It’s anecdotal, but let me give you a few examples of how my purchasing habits have become, and I assume that I used to buy things pretty much like everyone else.

Pants, one of my co-workers recommended a brand of pants from a Danish store called shaping new tomorrow, they have two real stores and their own internet business. They are the only pants I buy now, because they fit my needs. I used to buy pants at various places, but these guys really hit the nail on what I need, and as such their brand is immensely important to my pants buying.

Blood Bowl, I play it and I buy 3rd party miniatures. In the blood bowl community there is a lot of talk on who build the best 3rd party miniatures. I prefer willys miniatures and Greebo Games myself, and typically only buy their stuff. Again these are small mom and pop companies with their own little web shops that have become successful through their brands being associated with high quality.

T-shirts, I used to be a shirt guy. But a couple of years ago I started wearing t-shirts with prints. These are perhaps the best example because you can buy from so many places. And I did, I’ve bought t-shirts from about twenty different shops, but these days I mainly buy from qwertee because their fit suits my body best. Again their brand and the product I associate with it is important.

I used to buy things of amazon, and stores like it here in Denmark. But because it’s almost impossible, or at least takes a lot of time to associate sellers and quality on those platforms I almost never use them now. This was all anecdotal, but if I’m not alone in this, then brand matters quite a bit these days.

> I think brand matters more than ever.

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.

If.

> 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.

That's not my experience at all. A few years ago I would have been looking for the unknown chinese brands that could provide me with a gear that was "good enough". Now I will not even consider buying anything that is not from the top 5 brands for each thing. I have been burned too many time by products that were _almost_ as good, but not quite, and broke quickly. My branded gear is usually lasting forever (lenovo laptop, bose headset, roomba cleaner, instapot) as long as I buy on the medium/high-end end of the spectrum.

The thing is that as it is said over and over in this thread, you cannot trust reviews, and I would add that you cannot trust most of the smaller blogs/review websites because most would say anything about a product as long as they are paid.

If I buy the new Sony noise cancelling headsets, I know I will not get disappointed: it is a reputable brand, and it is the high-end of the range. This strategy is not perfect, far from it, and some brand are taking advantage of it. In that case, vote with your wallet. You can't really do that with no-name brands.

I'm not saying brands are not an indicator. Indeed, if I'm going to buy a USB-C cable, I'm going to use it as a filter.

I'm saying brand loyalty has lost its power now.

Sony is a good example. You say it's a reputable brand, yet sometimes they just lose it do something absolutely terrible. The first one that comes to mind is infecting willingly their customers with a rootkit in 2005 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...), but it's just because I don't follow up on those things as much. I'm sure there are ones in the last 5 years, although with PR firms doing their job as well as they do now, a quick google search will seldom return anything.

Companies don't have a customer first mentality anymore.

Loyalty doesn't mean anything for them, and so you being loyal to them makes no sense.

And it does mean a more complicated world, because you constantly have to reassess where to buy from.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sony-stoldendata-idUSTRE7...

>Sony is a good example.

The fact that you're bringing up a 15 year old incident proves that doing bad things can sting, perhaps scar permanently.

It's foolish to think there's a company that will always "do right". They are run by humans.

I've found a lot of value in niche brands. For instance the Finnish outdoor/military/surplus store Varusteleka have some quite good own-brand products.

Their Särmä-brand "common jeans" are just that; classic straight cut jeans with a medium waist, no stone-washing or other artificial wear, and a little bit of stretch for comfort. For someone like me who has large thighs from lifting weights, there are many otherwise nice pants I just can't wear, but these are perfect. Most brands these days have 5 different kinds of slim/skinny fit, and 1 straight fit if you're lucky.

Their "tactical jeans" are even better, with roughly the same cut and the addition of a crotch gusset for mobility and discreet extra pockets. There's a bit of polyester in the fabric for durability and a bit more stretch too. They're literally as comfortable as sweat pants, it's uncanny. If they last as long as promised, I doubt I will ever buy other jeans again.

Overall, I would say don't trust brands, trust quality, and don't trust reviews on big sites like Amazon.

> Unfortunate, brand loyalty doesn't mean anything anymore

> sometimes, the same product, between two batches, is not produce by the same sub-contractor

This is how branding has always been. Gomorrah details the manufacturing process for high-end fashion brands: any number of clothing factories simultaneously accept a contract to deliver X items of clothing in Y time at Z unit price, the brand gives free materials to everyone who accepts, and the first factory to deliver the X items gets paid. Every other factory who accepted is stuck with a bunch of clothing rejected not for quality reasons, but because they turned it in slower than the first factory.

A lot of that clothing is then sold by organized crime using unauthorized brand labels. But is a shirt with a fake Calvin Klein label -- manufactured for Calvin Klein exactly to their specifications -- really "counterfeit"?

One of the best choices I've made is to simply avoid any product which features conspicuous logos that are obviously meant to be seen.

There is no value for me in having a big Superdry or whatever logo blazoned across my chest. Instead I choose clothing with no logos, aside from what's on the tags inside. I make a small exception for polo shirts, because it just seems like it's integral part of the design to have a small logo on the left chest. I do try to choose high-quality shirts with small unobtrusive logos.

This has served me quite well for a while now.

> - sometime, the same product, between two batches, is not produce by the same sub-contractor

Case example: I have two pairs of a specific model of cycling gloves, both are subtly different in materials and have different labeling styles, as well as different "made in" statements (one European, one Asian). Had I bought them from Amazon I might wonder which one is fake and it wouldn't be clear at all. But I got both pairs directly from company HQ stocks, the closest thing to a definition of "authentic" we have in today's inscrutable networks of subcontracting.

> - a lot of companies don't manufacture the product themself

But the brand is responsible for the quality as perceived by the customer. They retain any good brand image by properly managing supply/subcontractor chain with quality control.

For the end user expiernce, it is not important who manufactures what but what assurances about the quality are made.

These are two different arguments, though. Yes, everything you listed is true, and it's largely what led to brand cynicism in the first place. However, this new Amazon problem (at least within the ecosystem of Amazon) is markedly worse. There are 1000 brands, and most of them are terrible, and the reviews are worthless, and you can't even see or hold the product in your hand. In this situation, a trusted brand has more internal consistency (despite all the issues you correctly noted) than the very inconsistent fly-by-night brands you can find on Amazon.

Of course, my argument falls apart if we can't spot counterfeits on Amazon.

>- PR firms are so powerful now they can make any brand great again. See Microsoft.....

Well, yes in an era where any kid in their early 20s can be CTO of a startup, and get their 5 min of fame for saying Webkit is the new IE, thinks IE era meant IE 7 and never developed a thing during Pre IE6. Of coz they get moved by PR and Marketing. For those of us "old enough" who have been burnt, or at least old enough to be a little less idealistic. I am not really seeing the power of PR.

On the subject of Microsoft, it isn't really a powerful PR I mean you have to give them credit Satya's Microsoft is a lot different to Mid 90s Microsoft. There are lots of signs they are moving in right direction ( even though it is still bumpy ). From Xbox, Gaming, Windows, Azure, Open Source. While the quality still isn't there yet, but at least they know their quality is not good enough. And that is much better than old Microsoft where nothing is a problem as long as the sales are moving.