Brands help consumers make reliable purchasing decisions. Amazon fucks this up all the time by trying to homogenize products and force you to discriminate on ad placement and price. Look at any category of consumer packaged goods on Amazon. If I search for “stroller rain cover” I get back 1000 identical products with identical fake ratings. Making a choice is hard, and if I make the wrong one my baby gets lead poisoning.
Branding lets me use my past experiences to make that decision process easier. I don’t want to have to look at technical specs and try to SAT solve for the optimal choice in my head or play secret hitler and read 1000s of ratings.