> Branding is a moat but it's not a deep moat.
Branding is an extraordinary moat in fact and it is very deep. That's why you can walk into CVS, Walgreens, Walmart, Target, Costco and buy Kleenex and pay a brand mark-up for it, and they have a lot of shelf space in most stores. For no great reason other than brand and people keep buying it - that magic branded paper - by the billions of dollars worth every year.
The same is true for cereal products. $6 for a tiny box of branded, sugar loaded, garbage cereal? Laughable, absurd, and yet people just keep buying it. $3 for a little can of soup, outrageous, and people just keep paying it just to get the brand. It's all for the brand.
The same goes for branded over the counter healthcare products, such as Advil, or countless cough & cold products and supplements. How is Advil still such a massive brand? The brand value is very, very deep. It is deeply entrenched into the consumer thinking process, so much so they commonly think Advil is meaningfully superior to generic labels.
The same is true for the sugar water of Coke and Pepsi. Or 5Hour Energy. Or Monster. Or RedBull. There is nothing particularly special about any of it other than branding + routine. The flavors are fairly easy to mimic or even surpass. Also goes for branded bottled water, most of which is silly labeling, the height of bullshit branding.
$45,000 - $60,000 for a middle tier metal shit box of a vehicle, from any number of the automakers in the bottom 90% in terms of quality. Consumers could go used for $15,000 - $20,000. Instead of piling up an extra $150,000 in net wealth over a couple decades, they do the really dumb thing instead, because they can't control themselves (extremely poor impulse control, same reason they're all so obese and unhappy). They buy those cars to keep up with their peers in lifestyle projection, same reason they buy the brands in anything. If you get position as a brand, you've got consumers in hand (then it's just down to fighting with the other brands).