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The Brand Age

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Brand Age

#201

Post by Zak »

jgrahamc wrote: post #14

" Because at Patek he'd encounter the most extreme brand age phenomenon: artificial scarcity. You can't just buy a Nautilus. You have to spend years proving your loyalty first by buying your way through multiple tiers of other models, and then spend years on a waiting list. " Strange game, the only winning move is not to play. I've heard other brands do this (Ferrari?) and, of course, there are lines outside "luxury"…

Jay Leno, perhaps the world's most famous car collector refuses to buy a Ferrari due to practices like that.

Re: The Brand Age

#202

Post by dandellion »

iamwil wrote: post #134

I kept thinking that he'd eventually compare it to writing software by hand, and how we're at the end of one golden age. But he never did. So I wonder what the impetus for the essay was.

About a quarter in I figured out, if there was a point to the article he should have gotten to it already, if it's taking this long maybe he just wants to write about watches. So I skimmed and I was mostly right, the way it's presented I think you can probably draw comparisons to a few other things, not just writing software, but it's more of an optional exercise for the reader.

Re: The Brand Age

#204

Post by pnexk »

elevatortrim wrote: post #163
Traster wrote: post #97

>That's not why brand age watches look strange. Brand age watches look strange because they have no practical function. Their function is to express brand, and while that is certainly a constraint, it's not the clean kind of constraint that generates good things. The constraints imposed by brand ultimately depend on some of the worst features of human psychology. So when you have a world defined only by brand, it's g…

I agree. Following his x account and posts, intellectuality in PG’s content has gone massively downhill (starting from slightly earlier than his recent rants about ‘wokeness’). Once one of my favourite writers is really hard to read now. It feels to me like he is so overconfident now that he thinks he gets it in any topic, even on the ones he has very little understanding of.

I’d wish for a more pointed rebuttal than merely a post complaining that the writer now sucks on here. It seems substantial to a degree of a post to me at least even if not whole in its conclusions.

Re: The Brand Age

#205

Post by userulluipeste »

garethsprice wrote: post #114
jgrahamc wrote: post #14

" Because at Patek he'd encounter the most extreme brand age phenomenon: artificial scarcity. You can't just buy a Nautilus. You have to spend years proving your loyalty first by buying your way through multiple tiers of other models, and then spend years on a waiting list. " Strange game, the only winning move is not to play. I've heard other brands do this (Ferrari?) and, of course, there are lines outside "luxury"…

Humans are status-seeking creatures, and status is expressed through signaling. If you're rich and so are the people around you, money alone ceases to be a differentiator. Ultra-luxury brands appeal to this by adding hoops that money alone can't clear: time, loyalty, relationships. The signal shifts from "I can afford this" to "I was invited to spend my money here." Lines outside Louis Vuitton are more down-market, a…

"The signal shifts from «I can afford this» to «I was invited to spend my money here.»" "the signal isn't wealth but access"

The most shocking aspect here is the mindset of these people that come to value this access, and the fact that they have to have their own self-perceived worth at some lower (i.e. improvable) level in comparison. It has to be, otherwise the value of that access can't make much sense, otherwise that association to a brand (as chosen not chooser) can't be perceived as something of value. The only (sane) question worth asking, knowing that about the people falling into this game is - do I want to count myself as one of them?

Re: The Brand Age

#207

Post by pnexk »

Herring wrote: post #144

He's omitting the most important bit. Data from the OECD shows highly unequal societies tend to be more status-obsessed, leading to higher spending on "positional goods" (items bought to signal status). These economies often have higher advertising expenditures (as a percentage of GDP) to fuel that competition. Inequality is quite corrosive in many ways, including leading to fascism.

true. This is a good essay but there’s, as to be expected, not too much of an acknowledgement of the economic and political backdrop of the arena this played out in. A lot of discussions of this essay therefore get diluted into musings about aspects of human nature and its tendency to obsess over status and while missing the broader point about the role these sorts of corpo strategies play in modern societal wellbeing.

Re: The Brand Age

#209

Post by fud101 »

jgrahamc wrote: post #14

" Because at Patek he'd encounter the most extreme brand age phenomenon: artificial scarcity. You can't just buy a Nautilus. You have to spend years proving your loyalty first by buying your way through multiple tiers of other models, and then spend years on a waiting list. " Strange game, the only winning move is not to play. I've heard other brands do this (Ferrari?) and, of course, there are lines outside "luxury"…

>Strange game, the only winning move is not to play.

pg dr. This is the answer. A pg article is clickbait at best, harmful at worst. Keep in mind this is the same man who chose to write his antiwokeness hit peace right at the cusp of the election.

Re: The Brand Age

#210

Post by hammock »

armchairhacker wrote: post #65
benleejamin wrote: post #42

I don't think the Brand Age is as bleak as this essay suggests. Branding is not inherently unproductive, nor is it guaranteed to produce worse watches. They may be larger and less accurate , but consumers still (evidently) find value in the brand. A Grand Seiko or a Nomos or a Patek is perhaps now even more interesting & identity-productive than a watch was in the 60s. As technologists I think we're prone to dismissi…

What I got from the essay: "brand is the only way to beat competition when you can't significantly beat them on quality". It's basically the market suffering from success. You can buy a cheap quality watch today. For some product types there is no better alternative, like ISPs. But I'd argue this is because of monopoly, which is different from brand. Most monopolies (like ISPs) usually have negative brands, and there…

So the cutting edge things are happening in places where brand doesn’t matter. I could think of better examples but moldbot/clawdworld comes to mind. Or ASML, or national lab physics, or cheap attack drones, or.. idk can anyone think of better examples?

And “brand age” (as a broad moniker) is another way of saying innovation has stagnated.

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