I petition to rename "feature" as "complication" on software teams.
Hahaha seconded. Followup terminology: - Complication creep - Complication-complete - Complication requests
> Complication-complete
Surely this cannot exist.
The Brand Age
391–400 of 403 posts
Re: The Brand Age
#392[dead]
Re: The Brand Age
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Status is a tool for the working wealthy, but ultra-luxury brands are only appealing to a subset of wealthy people. There’s a great number of people with 100+M and even far beyond that who enjoy nobody knowing just what kind of wealth they have. This doesn’t mean looking poor, but there’s plenty of value in anonymity.
I don't know why anyone would want to be rich and famous.
Rich and anonymous is where it's at.
Re: The Brand Age
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 sy…
Exactly I am just disagreeing with your definition of brand, which I think is what were doing with the original essay as well.
Of course a company can structure itself fully aligned with its brand: I start Philip's Tyre Repair and the brand is 1:1 with the company and the premises. I don't see why being able to do that is important to enforce.
The point is, particularly with somewhere like Nike, that they have all sorts of things they need to do (advertise shoes; design shoes; make shoes; move shoes; sell shoes to retailers) that not all of it needs to be branded as Nike particularly. Only really the advertise shoes is the "brand".
It's like how Red Bull outsource basically everything except advertising. Someone else makes the drinks; someone else moves them; someone else sells them. They just maintain a really good brand with advertising, including innovative stuff like X-games.
Re: The Brand Age
#395Wild timing on this. Been seeing a huge uptick in people "trying to learn opsec" as they fumble around for ways to make money with openclaw and land on "selling fake bags/shoes/watches", seemingly emboldened by those who value these brands trying to use openclaw to secure mispriced items or snipe auctions. Funny thing is, I'm not sure anyone is actually doing either thing successfully. Every time I've looked into an…
Could it be that fake success stories (and, perhaps, associated "training material") are the real product there?
100%. Why become a drug dealer when you could sell $1200 tickets to a webinar that teaches people to deal drugs?
Re: The Brand Age
#396Classic PG essay in a lot of ways, but I was expecting (a) the entire watch discussion to be 1/10th of its length, and (b) lead DIRECTLY into a social commentary around how every area -- politics, software dev, music creation & distribution etc -- are now firmly in their terminal brand ages. A political admin lies directly to your face daily - well, the base doesn't care because they've bought into the brand. The Tru…
Kudos! This comment really gave simplicity to my feelings on this whole thing too! (Favourited your comment) I just want to add a minor point that the marketing/advertising industry in general just sometimes feels very unethical to me and I am worried about that too. Increasingly so, The only way to survive in brand age is to connect to two or three centralized platforms. Authenticity feels redundant. > A talented mu…
Nice points! You reminded me that, actually, contrary to my hand-wringing, the IG algorithm is excellent (for me) when it comes to recommending music - and it's often artists with very few monthly listeners on Spotify.
Why is IG so much better than Spotify itself's algo? Or YouTube's? Or... etc? No idea. And also - it's always paid ads from these artists that get me.
So on the one hand, ; but on the other, as much as technology is perhaps driving the brand hollowness, it's also allow for more long-tail discovery precisely because it makes powerful marketing/advertising channels accessible to that girl making beats in her bedroom - so long as she has a bit of $ to deploy. It still may not be profitable for her (because: Spotify) but I also try to support these artists with merch buys, physical buys, etc.
Re: The Brand Age
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have several hobbies, and none of them revolve around artifical scarcity or gatekeeping. (Well, the way that _some_ people play Magic: The Gathering does - but I wouldn't want to play with anyone who raised a stink about proxies)
Look, I dont want to be argumentative, but my (perhaps cynical) view on people who say they don't do status signaling when they "avoid status signaling" is it's just like the fish who goes "what's water"? It's worth thinking about whether you're doing it by accident.
You're shifting the goalposts. I agree that status signalling happens in hobbies. I disagree that everyone who indulges in a hobby does so purely - or even mostly, or at all! - in order to be able to tell stories about ways they managed to "cut the line".
Some of just like to do things, and to attain status by doing things well, rather than by bragging about our ability to cheat.
EDIT: to put it a different way - all tales of "skipping the line" are an integral part of that hobby; but not all hobbies involve, and not all hobbyists enjoy, tales of "skipping the line". And; every tale of "skipping the line" is status signalling, but not every status signal is such a tale.
Re: The Brand Age
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a fantastic book on this topic called "By Design : Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV" that cover the inception of modern brands. It's a very similar story to what happened to watches. The industrial revolution made quality clothing accesible for everyone, so the cloth appearance no longer was a clear indicative of status, so brands started placing their emblems on the outsid…
Looks great. I just ordered it. Thanks for the recommendation.
I also got the recommendation from here, happy to see I'm giving it back!
Re: The Brand Age
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if it's intentional that they all say "Aquisitions", with no "c". As for fonts etc: https://hobancards.com/blogs/thoughts-and-curiosities/americ...
They all have the same phone number too. This could be explained away by them working for the same place and assuming to contact them you call the same switchboard and ask for the person, but even back in the 90s it would have been strange for wall street "Vice Presidents" (even if it was somewhat of a ceremonial title) to not have their own unique business number. Also, Paul Allen giving his card to someone else wit…
Some of the typos and poor typography might be accidental simply because that is so common, but the rest of it is surely deliberate.
Remember that _American Psycho_ is repeatedly hinting to you throughout the movie that most, or even all, of what you see is just Bateman's own delusions and hallucinations, which are inferior imitations of reality due to his own impoverished mind and lack of substance. So there's a lot of little tricks all throughout it to subtly destabilize you: https://www.moviemaker.com/american-psycho-anniversary-oral-...
Re: The Brand Age
#400Because he focuses in the story of luxury watches, Graham sees only the brand tricks that work mostly for rich people. There are brands for non-rich: Linux is a very strong brand but virtually free and non-exclusive at all (think Android phones). Patriotism and country reputation might also be thought as brands. E.g. would Portugal's tourist boom happen without the Portuguese tarts popularity? Edit: my watch is a Peb…
Linux isn't a strong brand at all. Even nerds would struggle to tell you what a 'Linux' is (or as I prefer to call it, since that's every non-smartphone Linux I've ever used, 'GNU/Linux'). And I've never even heard of 'Portuguese tarts', and I've heard plenty about Portugal and briefly considered going there last year for tourism.
Pebble went out of business, incidentally.