© Blue Moon of Shanghai
One of the greatest frauds ever perpetrated on consumers is the branding of consumer products, a practice created almost entirely in the US,
achieving significance only from an overwhelming flood of abusive psychological propaganda and advertising. In probably no other place did American corporations and ad agencies apply Bernays' psychiatric propaganda methods of public manipulation with more bloodthirsty determination than in their creation of the fiction of branding, and in no other country are brands treated with the reverence they are in the US.
In real life, a brand is nothing. It is only a name that has no value other than for product identification. Any value is in the product itself, but the large firms have spent literally tens of billions of dollars to convince Americans and the world otherwise. Everything we have been told and taught about brands is a lie, what someone called "meticulous landscaping" of the consumer environment.
To a consumer, there is no value in a brand. The relation between a product and its brand is identical to that of a steak and its sizzle, but the brand has been cleverly drilled into our minds as the definitive element containing utility and value. Just as these same firms concluded many decades earlier that if people would pay for sizzle there was no need to provide the steak, they later correctly concluded that if customers would pay for a brand there was no need to provide a product, at least not of any commensurate value. The sizzle has no value; its only function is to stimulate our emotions to desire.
Similarly, a brand has no value, but branding has been abused to serve only as a kind of psychological deceit.It is a story well-known and often told that in areas of the US all tomatoes from all farms in a large geographical area are delivered to the same factory, where they are all mixed together, washed, cooked and put into cans. On the morning shift, the cans are affixed with a low-price generic label for one customer, while in the afternoon the same tomatoes from the same farms in the same cans on the same production line will have another firm's "premium" label pasted on them, and appear on supermarket shelves at 150% to 200% of the price of those from the morning shift.
The magic of branding.To most large multinational companies today, this is the real value of a "brand" - the power to give consumers the same or less, but charge much more. We have been trained through fear and uncertainty to believe that a lower-price product is substandard or perhaps even toxic, and our uncertainty pushes us to the "premium" brands even though there is nothing premium about them except the price. So-called "luxury" products are even worse.
Marketers boast that companies like LV and Apple can charge two or three times the price of another product equal in quality in every way, so you can see why these firms spend so much money on "branding": it gives them the ability to charge more and more while giving customers less and less.
Comment: At least a precedent has been set here. If anyone tries to bar another player from playing, despite being well enough to do so, they can simply point to this ruling. Instead of being "outraged," this should be seen as a win for Australian sports, which may now be forced to drop the whole covid charade.