> Branding is centrifugal; design is centripetal So they’re the same thing but from two frames of reference? I’m not sure this metaphor holds.
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The Brand Age
301–310 of 403 posts
Re: The Brand Age
#302I liked reading this essay, but, I get the same vibe as a lot of PG essays. Which is, great writing and really intelligent thinking on an interesting subject, but without really being aware of ther stuff people have previously said/thought on the topic. For instance: > Brand is what's left when the substantive differences between products disappear. I think, for better and worse, brands are a lot more than that. Bran…
> Nike couldn't be the global brand it was today if it directly managed all its factories.
Re: The Brand Age
#303I 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…
Yeah, I agree. This sentiment is weird to me. As a counterpoint, look at Ben and Jerry's ice cream from the 1990s. It was such a cool brand back in the day, and made delicious high-fat ice cream. (I know, I know: They sold out. But I am talking about before the sell-out.) Also, look at Chobani Yogurt in this generation. Amazing product and stellar brand.
Re: The Brand Age
#304I liked reading this essay, but, I get the same vibe as a lot of PG essays. Which is, great writing and really intelligent thinking on an interesting subject, but without really being aware of ther stuff people have previously said/thought on the topic. For instance: > Brand is what's left when the substantive differences between products disappear. I think, for better and worse, brands are a lot more than that. Bran…
> Brands at least start out as a designation of quality, but in modern society, they're an important part in companies avoiding legal liability, and having more distributed supply chains.
This isn't brand; this is legal company structure. Brand is "what people think of when they hear the word Nike".
Re: The Brand Age
#305> Of course they don't call them golden ages as they're happening. "Golden age" is a term people use later, after they're over. That doesn't mean that golden ages aren't real, but rather that their participants take them for granted at the time. They don't know how good they have it. But while it's usually a mistake to take one's good fortune for granted, it's not in this case. What a golden age feels like, at the ti…
Arguably, not even the pre-LLM era, enterprise sales started dominating over technical excellence some time before LLMs were invented.
Enterprise sales predate the 2000s-2010s when B2C work really took off with places like Google, Amazon, and platforms like mobile. Mainframes in the 1960s. Relational databases in the 1980s. Productivity in the 1990s.
Re: The Brand Age
#306A good time to remind any of the "watch nerds" mentioned that this exists: https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/
Re: The Brand Age
#307I liked reading this essay, but, I get the same vibe as a lot of PG essays. Which is, great writing and really intelligent thinking on an interesting subject, but without really being aware of ther stuff people have previously said/thought on the topic. For instance: > Brand is what's left when the substantive differences between products disappear. I think, for better and worse, brands are a lot more than that. Bran…
> Nike couldn't be the global brand it was today if it directly managed all its factories. This is a weird statement to me. Replace "Nike" with "Intel". Intel manages all of its factories and is a global brand. (Yes, I know they recently outsourced some chip manuf to TSMC, but Intel was surely a global brand in the 1990s.) I don't get it. What am I missing?
Intel is definitely the exception. For most companies, like Nike or Apple to take two, they in-house design work, but then contract out manufacturing to external companies, who often themselves subcontract out work further.
I'm speculating now, but it seems really likely if that type of distributed supply chain didn't exist, we'd see a closer coupling of design and manufacturing (at an extreme end factories designing and producing their own product).
That outsourcing of manufacturing has let US companies like Nike and Apple stay dominant in the design field, despite almost all their manufacturing being carried out by Asian companies.
Ultimately the global economy is very complicated, but a lot of it is predicated on that design/manufacturing split, which is only enabled by distributed manufacturing contracted out by brands.
I'm not trying to argue any of this is good/bad, but just that the concept of a 'brand' plays a huge function in determining what the world economy looks like, and isn't an empty concept.
Re: The Brand Age
#308I liked reading this essay, but, I get the same vibe as a lot of PG essays. Which is, great writing and really intelligent thinking on an interesting subject, but without really being aware of ther stuff people have previously said/thought on the topic. For instance: > Brand is what's left when the substantive differences between products disappear. I think, for better and worse, brands are a lot more than that. Bran…
> Brands at least start out as a designation of quality, but in modern society, they're an important part in companies avoiding legal liability, and having more distributed supply chains. This isn't brand; this is legal company structure. Brand is "what people think of when they hear the word Nike".
I suppose we're just disagreeing on definition here - but I'd at least try to make the case that if people having a single thing they think of when they hear the word Nike, is necessary for a company to be able to structure itself that way legally.
Otherwise, individual manufacturing companies, don't have the financial incentive to give companies like Nike as big a portion of the profits as they do. Currently that system works, because the brand association of "Nike" gives people some kind of status/quality-assurance/whatever that they are happy to pay for.
Re: The Brand Age
#309A good time to remind any of the "watch nerds" mentioned that this exists: https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/
What an amazing post, thank you for sharing
Re: The Brand Age
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
He’s probably also too rich for fancy watches to actually be a useful signal of wealth amongst his peers.
I had a coworker who became nouveau riche a while back- he made fuck you money day trading during the roaringkitty debacle - and one interesting thing he said about the experience was that he learned certain luxury goods, such as high end watches, don't depreciate. Like gold jewelry one can usually resell them for cost plus inflation. As such, his logic was that a fancy watch is essentially free while a cheap watch c…
I dunno about that. I bought a Casio at a garage sale in the late eighties for 20 cents, and sold it to a mate 10 years later, give or take, for a couple of bucks. It was still running, still keeping time.
Expensive watches are way closer to bitcoins than useful assets. They inherently rely on the gullibility of other rich prick wanna be's. Still a good bet probably.. sadly..