Branding and Costing

So this post is about BRANDING and COSTING.

What determines cost? its not the quality, its not the quantity... its just the BRAND. Be it anything, branding is the only point why you but a product. thats why it is said packaging is important than the content, be it any product, or your life or anything.

By branding i mean, the name it is given, the value anything has is not what it actually is, but it is by what others think of it. You go to market and you will pick anything even if you have not used it but if you have seen it on TV lot of times, or you have heard your neighbor talking about it. I have seen others and even myself that we leave a product we had be using long to try something new, we do it based on how much others have branded it. Thats the main reason why companies spend so much on advertising, because advertising is what creates a brand.

You will never question the cost in Adidas, Reebok, Woodland showroom about the cost of any shoe, you wont bargain.. ever thought why..not because its quality is good or something ... because of the BRAND.

Once a brand is established , now you need nothing... add as many zeros to the cost as you think and you can sell it. People are crazy about brand. the most interesting part is, to make a bigger brand, just increase the cost, nothing else.

Everyone knows Quality has a upper limit, so everyone is making good quality goods, its just if your cost is more so you are a bigger brand and a bigger style statement ;)

Even if it comes to yourself, if you can make yourself a brand, you can go places, you can rock the world. Take for eg Ankit Fadia.. go google him.. you will find everywhere written "self proclaimed hacker".. In the wikipedia article every line starts with "he claims...." , so nothing is true, its just he has made himself a brand and he is making money.
If Picasso signed a painting it becomes priceless, if its not branding then what is it ?

Go for Google instead... Majority of Google products are nothing but acquisitions, Google made nothing from scratch in-house. What do they do, they buy a small company, give it a BRAND name called GOOGLE, and you are done. It is sold.

This all was about branding your company, products etc, but this applies to real life also.
Have you ever noticed someone in your group, team, class is most popular, is not popular because he has something extraordinary, its just because majority thinks so. So if everyone says that you Mr X is good in so n so, you cannot deny even though you didnt find it that good because everyone else does.

So moral is just brand yourself and then you are done. It reminds me of a story of 5 monkeys kept in a cage, and a banana is there on the ladder, and whichever monkey tries to go for the banana, all other monkey are sprayed with chilled water. Some time later whenever a monkey tries to go for the banana, all other stop him to save themselves from cold water. Now a monkey is replaced a new one, this new monkey unaware of the consequences tries to climb the ladder, and is beaten up by remaining four. Now one more monkey is replaced with new one and now this first monkey also beats this new one unaware of the reason why he is doing so, just because everyone else is doing. Then third, fourth, fifth monkeys are also replaced one by one.
After replacing all the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys have ever been sprayed with cold water. Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approaches the stairs to try for the banana.

Why not?

Because as far as they know that's the way it's always been done around here.
That's BRANDING, noone knows why is a brand X better than brand Y. It the cost which make a brand bigger as it becomes fashion statement. Almost all brands give best quality, its just whichever makes a bigger hype, it bigger and you just follow the trend of market, you follow the masses like those monkeys. What everyone says or does is right ;)