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Comment by shmatt | Hacker News Reader

This has nothing to do with journalism and everything to do with the term “brand recognition”

The boomer concept of the 80s that we can’t get rid of. People still think something is high or low quality because some licensed logo of a company that ceased operations 20 years ago is on it

That Calvin Klein jacket from tj maxx? No calvin Klein employee had ever even seen its design before. Your Toshiba TV was not made or designed by Toshiba

We need to step away from the 80s and start focusing on quality instead of logo playing cards being traded between billionaires

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The nice thing about brands is it (used to be) a good standin for quality.

Costco is still sort of like this for me. If I need $thing, I can just go get whichever brand of thing Costco is selling. There are usually only a couple choices, and they're generally pretty decent and good value.

In the absence of branding like this, I need to go make an informed decision on every purchase, in product areas I'm often not particularly familiar with or qualified to judge. The dazzling array of widgets available in whatever category doesn't help if I can't tell a good from a bad widget, can't trust online reviews, and can't take "made by $brand_i_know" as a badge of it probably being fine.

I agree we've lost this to a large degree, but I do think it's more of a shame than you seem to be suggesting.

>can't trust online reviews

I don't think that's universally true. I may not trust Amazon user reviews a whole lot. I least I need to interpret them. But, in my experience, something like Wirecutter won't lead you that far astray. Probably not Consumer Reports either although I don't subscribe.

That's fair; I agree that the information is probably mostly out there somewhere, there's just a lot of noise in the signal. Perhaps I'm also over-indexing on the idea that I used to be able to just blindly buy something from a brand I trusted.

It calls into the question the very notion of teams in all professional sports. What does it mean to support a team when a quarter of the players change every year, and the entire roster is brand new every five years? What's left in ManchesterU if you take away the brand?

All that means to say is that too much money is tied to branding, and individuals, corporations and countries will continue to ride this cash cow for as long as it lasts.

how can customers quickly assess quality of a good? brands had a reputation

Brand recognition is still a thing. Apple is doing ok for example. It's not really just an 80s boomer concept.

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