Brands/trademarks are an identifier, actually not a token of trust. I don't have much trust in "Walmart", "Capital One", or "Oracle", but a brand isn't about t

Brands/trademarks are an identifier, actually not a token of trust. I don't have much trust in "Walmart", "Capital One", or "Oracle", but a brand isn't about trust, it is about identifying goods and services. The brand/trademark is there to identify those cheap goods as from Walmart, Inc. (as opposed to, say K-mart), that overly-expensive, poor-performing database as from Oracle, Inc (as opposed to, say, the not-as-expensive SQL Server). Of course, you generally want your brand/trademark to be trusted, but they are an identifier, not a symbol of trust. In fact, a token of trust cannot be created by the company, it has to be created by the people who trust it (the consumer). The fact that people pre-order a game or a Tesla is a token of trust, but the name Tesla is not a token of trust. "Tesla" might be a trusted brand, but it is not a token of trust. Now the case of Amazon is interesting. Amazon has created a system where the brand actually has no meaning, because they will co-mingle inventory from anyone who claims it is identical, in particular, counterfeits. So I buy something with brand X, but there is actually no guarantee that it actually came from the makers of X. So Amazon's marketplace actually undermines brands. A world without brands/trademarks looks like Fulfilled by Amazon, not like a bunch of untrusted goods and services. The problem with Fulfilled by Amazon is that there is no guarantee that the item is what it claims it is and the whole point of brands/trademarks is to uniquely identify an item.