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There's a somewhat pervasive idea that advertising and brand recognition are coercive tools that will ultimately die out, replaced by better objective informati

There's a somewhat pervasive idea that advertising and brand recognition are coercive tools that will ultimately die out, replaced by better objective information about products. I'm kind of partial to this idea myself. But increasingly we seem a long way from achieving this. Amazon reviews have become such garbage, I've fallen back to pretty much relying on name brands as my placeholder for product quality. There's still a lot to be said for established brands. Brands can afford widespread advertising because they have thriving businesses that generate lots of cash. Brands can get stocked in major retailers because you need decent products to make it through Walmart's buying process. These are signals that are harder to fake, and they're kind of the best we've got right now.

pjc50 6y ago
If anything, the last few years of politics have convinced me that objective information is more likely to die out, replaced by advertising, brand recognition, and coercive tools.
- kube-system 6y ago
  I feel like this could be said any time over the past 100 years, at a minimum.
- Grimm1 6y ago
  An older friend of mine made the observation that really before the few large news networks and papers in the last 40-50 years objective information that everyone roughly agreed upon was not the norm. Yellow journalism, hearsay and rumors dominated common conversation. He observed that with the internet we're returning to what was this "normal" state with anybody being able to post something and gain widespread recognition, the difference of course being the rate at which this non-objective information travels and the better ability to weaponize it. I think, after looking into it a bit more, I agree with him and that our period of fairly objective news and political information and the general consensus that brought was the anomaly. This raises the question then how do we as society re-learn to cope with that and filter out non objective information because clearly we're not doing so well with it now. So, I don't think so much as it will die out as much as I think we need to develop abilities to separate wheat from chaff, stronger societal bullshit filters because truth will have a weaker signal.
  - username90 6y ago
    How much of that was the American propaganda machine doing its job to keep the western world united against communism? The change we are seeing could just be the end of the cold war leading to slow return to normal and not due to technology at all.
    - Grimm1 6y ago
      I mean united news cycles predated the cold war and wasn't an isolated American phenomenon and I'm not talking about America but the world so I don't see how your opinion is relevant to the topic other than to stir the pot.
  - coldpie 6y ago
    > I think, after looking into it a bit more, I agree with him and that our period of fairly objective news and political information and the general consensus that brought was the anomaly. This raises the question then how do we as society re-learn to cope with that and filter out non objective information because clearly we're not doing so well with it now. I don't know the answer, but my opinion is that we need to stop optimizing for views. I.e. kill the online advertising market. You can do your part by installing an ad blocker and paying for services you like with real money.
  - yrimaxi 6y ago
    Nostalgia for the days when the NYT and co. could lie the whole nation into some war (or rather the people who read the NYT).
    - Grimm1 6y ago
      Your words not mine bud.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - pjc50 6y ago
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
> replaced by better objective information about products I don't have much to add here, but economists call this perfect information.
- KirillPanov 6y ago
  I have even less to add, but while we're griping, I think academic fields should recieve a demerit for every term they introduce that involves the adjective "perfect". For example, cryptographers: you get a demerit for using the phrase "perfect forward secrecy". Just "forward secrecy" would've done the job, no need to pat yourselves on the back...
bombcar 6y ago
Amusingly enough if you trace the history of brand names ... this is why they started! And this is the strength that the major retailers have against Amazon - if Amazon won't police (and they have problems with commingling counterfeit brands, too) then Walmart and Target will jump ahead.
- fuball63 6y ago
  I was of a similar mind this year, but when I went to Walmart's website, they had 3rd party sellers on there too. It is really annoying, especially with the pandemic, trying to sift through all the trash online. I ended up buying we webcam from BestBuy.com, because a webcam I got from Amazon was pay-for-review and was utter garbage. Just more evidence, to me, that the era of internet business models being "get everything online" (Amazon, Spotify, Steam) is closing, and the era of online aggregation as a product is just beginning.
  - hanklazard 6y ago
    I've also found myself buying a lot of things from Best Buy, something I would have scoffed at 5-7 years ago. These days, I just want to know that I'm getting a genuine (vs replica) product and most of the time I can go pick-up my purchase same day, solving the "fast shipping" problem.
    - coldpie 6y ago
      Since NewEgg started up their 3rd party seller program, I've also switched to Best Buy. Running out of places to buy from that aren't flooded with trash.
      - ethbr0 6y ago
        Aka "the Etsy effect" (lowering the bar for new sellers results in a flood of bad-faith sellers)
      - mcpherrinm 6y ago
        BestBuy has added third party sellers online too: https://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/about/selling-on-marketplace/blt38484947eacf725e https://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/about/selling-on-marketplace/bl... Though they don’t seem to have many yet, I did run across it recently. In-store pickup items are still seemingly safe though.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
I myself am convinced that brand recognition is on borrowed time - that is, recognition of old brands may still work as useful filter, but new quality brands will be near-impossible to establish. The reason for that: we're being DDoSed with brands on e-commerce sites. For an increasing amount of product categories, you're going to find 10+ "brands" on Amazon that are selling the same white-label garbage class product, just with a different sticker and box/ad art. I've seen that in electronics, clothing, consumables. And while multiple brands under one company was a thing for a long time now (see e.g. how many stuff you eat is made by Nestlé or Unilever), there seems to be a qualitative difference here: white label goods meet e-commerce. "Brands" proliferate at the speed of computing.
- joseph_grobbles 6y ago
  Brands still arise out of that. I buy Spigen cases. Anker cables. If I want a low-cost but workable set of headphones for the kids, "MPOW" devices fit the bill. I know that Amazon Basics keyboards and mice will be satisfactory given the price. These do emerge.
  - Pxtl 6y ago
    Yeah, that. My son has an MPow fightstick and it's a solid product. MPow is doing a good job establishing themselves as a reputable new brand for electronics.
  - geerlingguy 6y ago
    Similarly, Anker, Choetech, and a few others to a certain extent. Some of them come from the ashes of Alibaba rebrands, but a few start making decent products and are at least at what I'd consider "Belkin-level" but at a better price point.
    - ben1040 6y ago
      Even Belkin is now a Foxconn brand at this point, but at least I have owned plenty of products built by Foxconn that haven’t burned my house down.
Pxtl 6y ago
Unfortunately Amazon's UI is actually pretty hostile to this, too. I was trying to buy simple USB cables... After a pair of tablets were destroyed by a bad USB cable, I'm picky about usb micro cables. So I tried to search on Amazon for usb a to micro cables... And the brand filter didn't list many of the brands I was seeing in the resultset. Like, I know you have Monoprice and Belkin cables, I'm looking right at them! Why can I only filter to Chinese no-name brands and Amazonbasics?
- 14 6y ago
  This comment caught my attention are bad cables really destroying your tablets? I ask because I literally power all my phones and tablets with cords I bought at the dollar store. Never had any problems. Have I just been lucky?
  - Bedon292 6y ago
    Not sure about Micro, but a few years back a Google employee posted a bunch of info about bad USB C cables. Sadly I think it was on Google+ and gone now, but his reviews are still on Amazon [1]. There were certainly some really bad ones, missing resistors and things, so its quite possible on C at least. [1] https://smile.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AFLICGQRF6BRJGH2RRD4VGMB47ZA/ https://smile.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AFLICGQRF6...
    - 14 6y ago
      Well I guess I will consider myself lucky. I learned my lesson with an amazon power cord for my Lenovo laptop. It charges fine but the casing around the electronics melted due to it getting so hot. It is my kids laptop and could have literally started a fire on him. I bought a new one from Staples and now won’t buy any electronics like that from amazon.
    - Tempest1981 6y ago
      Maybe Benson Leung? https://www.extremetech.com/computing/225719-amazon-bans-cheap-usb-c-cables-in-wake-of-google-engineers-crusade https://www.extremetech.com/computing/225719-amazon-bans-che... Try https://usbccompliant.com/ https://usbccompliant.com/
dopylitty 6y ago
Brands aren't perfect either. For example Volvo had a reputation for making great safe cars. The brand is now owned by a company with a reputation for making cars that disintegrate and obliterate the occupants in crash tests. The same is true of Arc'teryx, Jaguar, and many other well known brands that have been sold off to companies with terrible reputations for quality. Ultimately the only way to guarantee quality would be to vote for politicians who support strong regulations and a strong regulatory apparatus.
- rendall 6y ago
  > Ultimately the only way to guarantee quality would be to vote for politicians who support strong regulations and a strong regulatory apparatus. Speaking as a socialist-leaning libertarian, I'mma have to take a hard disagree on this. Let the companies have a mix of terrible quality and great quality as they wish, and let the market itself decide which products and companies succeed or fail Let a private company, say, Consumer Reports or Vegan International, give their imprimatures to quality. A government, in this specific case of toy drones, is a bit heavy-handed, in my opinion. Would "quality specs" work? Would they be subject to political whims? Would a connected company be able to overwhelm the governmental department dedicated to the quality control of toy drones? Edit: I promise, despite the proximity of "socialist" to "libertarian" in my preamble, this is not an ideological stance. If you have a better idea, I will change my mind! I'm fine with a downvote, but don't just smash it because you disagree. Tell us why :)
  - username90 6y ago
    There is a reason you aren't afraid of getting poisoned when you eat at restaurants, and it isn't because every restaurant owner cares about poisoning you but because the government have made the common practices which led to food poisoning illegal.
    - rendall 6y ago
      Here is an upvote for engaging. Kind of a non-sequitur, no? I was talking about toy drones.
nikanj 6y ago
Too bad buying the name brand on Amazon still gets you counterfeits and headaches
- libraryatnight 6y ago
  Yes, and even if the product seems like its legit - the manufacturers often won't honor warranties on products bought from Amazon if they don't have a formal relationship with them.
orev 6y ago
Given the counterfeit problem on Amazon, I have been using the retailer as a proxy instead. I feel much more comfortable buying things from a known retailer like Target or Walmart, since I can rely on them to at least do some kind of due diligence on the products they carry. I think this will be the way forward for these companies to stay in business as Amazon becomes overrun with junk.
- mattmcknight 6y ago
  Even though Walmart also has a marketplace full of mystery sellers, at least they still offer a simple filter at the outset to limit your results to only things they sell directly. At Amazon, you have to have already put another filter on your search results to see that option.
- prepend 6y ago
  This Christmas I used Walmart more than Amazon over 21 years of previous “Amazon christmases.” When I filtered for Walmart only my experience was great. No searching for ps5 and seeing Xbox ads, just stuff that matched my search. Also Walmart shipping was 1-2 days and free. So I guess logistics is getting figured out when Walmart free is beating Amazon prime.
- jay_kyburz 6y ago
  I use the retailer so that if the product breaks I can just walk back in and get my money back.
- KirillPanov 6y ago
  Same here but with Home Depot instead. They're pretty good at filtering out the absolute junk, because having customers return products is really expensive for brick+mortar retailers.
CapmCrackaWaka 6y ago
I know my comment will be lost in a sea of voices, but I need to share my experience _somewhere_ else other than amazon reviews. I got my fiancé two Christmas presents this year - both bought off Amazon. One was an electronic keyboard that was dead on arrival, the other was a snuggie type blanket that started falling apart yesterday. Both items had thousands of 5 star reviews. I usually go somewhere (anywhere) else besides Amazon because I have had bad experiences in the past, but this was the only place I could find the niche keyboard because it's an older model. I now have a firm rule that I will never order from Amazon again.
- coldpie 6y ago
  I've completely stopped ordering from Amazon, for three reasons: they have too much market power, they have serious ethics problems, and their 3rd party seller program has made the buying experience garbage. Welcome to the club.
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    I've come full circle and only order books (usually used) or things I don't care if they're Chinese bargain-version off Amazon anymore. Target, or occasionally Walmart, gets what used to be Amazon's business from me.
    - coldpie 6y ago
      Even books aren't safe. Support your local booksellers! https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/amazon-caught-selling-counterfeits-of-publishers-computer-books-again/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/amazo...
      - dan-robertson 6y ago
        Even for non-counterfeit books, I’ve often got shit quality print-on-demand versions with plates that look like an inkjet printer running low on ink and with the letters having fuzzy boundaries.
ethbr0 6y ago
> There's still a lot to be said for established brands. Brands can afford widespread advertising... Established brands can do one other thing -- enforce on-ground quality assurance in China / manufacturing outsourcer Chinese factories are amazing. But they produce what you let them produce. 1000-units-of-X, only QA'd when they hit receiving port, are going to trend to crap. On the other hand, established brands have the financial and relationship muscle to actually inspect and cut things out earlier, and therefore can maintain a higher quality level on shelves
HPsquared 6y ago
Branding is an emergent phenomenon in nature as well, e.g. flowers of particular shapes to attract bees. The book "Alchemy" by Rory Sutherland goes into this.
yrimaxi 6y ago
> There's a somewhat pervasive idea that advertising and brand recognition are coercive tools that will ultimately die out, replaced by better objective information about products. I'm kind of partial to this idea myself. Based on what? Are people investing less in marketing than before?
- prepend 6y ago
  My personal experience is that many brands had a high markup on brand recognition and I used to be able to find better quality and value through no name brands that made good products. The internet is supposed to spread information well and with perfect information I should be able to differentiate true quality vs just a known brand signaling quality. I think the problem is that places like Amazon distort information (eg, tolerate crappy reviews) because it makes them more money. The bazaar model is supposed to have some positive feedback loops to incentivize positive events, but that’s drifting away. So I used to think that effective marketplaces would replace brands with disintermediation and perfect info. But not so much now. This is sort of a tl;dr for why I buy Apple. They have a huge markup for brand name, but it’s exhausting to me to try to evaluate what’s the best laptop this year and I can trust Apple to probably be pretty good.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
biztos 6y ago
I just made a pretty big purchase decision in a field (cameras) where there is a lot of competition and reviews carry a lot of weight. In the end, the information that helped me make up my mind was from video reviews by mostly well-known photography vloggers on YouTube. This is also something that could be messed with by unscrupulous marketers, but there is a strong counterbalance to those anti-patterns: the vloggers themselves are trying to build reputations, because "top photography vlogger" presumably pays better than 99% of all other work that involves photography. I'm not sure how much this counts as "better objective information" -- other than seeing an object move around in someone's hands you're mostly getting an opinion -- but I found it super helpful and could easily imagine this being the "future of purchase-decision influence" or something like it. For example here are three channels I used, with radically different styles: 1. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCknMR7NOY6ZKcVbyzOxQPhw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCknMR7NOY6ZKcVbyzOxQPhw 2. https://www.youtube.com/user/christopherfrost https://www.youtube.com/user/christopherfrost 3. https://www.youtube.com/user/JaredPolin https://www.youtube.com/user/JaredPolin
- quasse 6y ago
  > because "top photography vlogger" presumably pays better than 99% of all other work that involves photography. Just to be clear though (I work in a field that relies heavily on niche-specifc YouTubers for marketing) - the reason that being a "top niche blogger" pays so well is because companies pay them a lot to encourage favorable opinions of their product lines. I've seen amounts that are several multiples of my annual salary for fairly small market segment channels - and it's not explicit like "We are hiring you to post positive reviews of our products" because that would need to be disclosed. It's more along the lines of "We are nominally hiring you as a brand ambassador, you will visit our HQ and make a collaboration video". But of course, YouTubers aren't stupid, they're not going to post negative content about brands that are paying them even if it's theoretically for something else. This is the same problem that PC hardware review magazines had back in the day - companies that purchased a lot of advertising from the parent company just happened to never get negative coverage in review articles. You can't bite the hand that feeds you.
  - 6y ago
tehjoker 6y ago
The problem is consumers are unorganized and people wanting to sell things can easily induce distortions in whatever recommender system by buying labor, companies, or products. You can only temporarily solve the problem before wealth demolishes objective feedback systems.
gumby 6y ago
> There's still a lot to be said for established brands. Thus the loop comes full circle. Originally the idea of a brand ("burned" -- burned into the hide of an animal or a piece of wood) was a way to label the provider in the hope that people would learn which providers were trustworthy and had high quality. This extended into manufactured products once printed packaging become popular (logos and labels, starting with low-input goods like tea). Then sometime in the 20th century people figured out that they could use mass advertising to build the brand (by then just a label) itself, sometimes even rendering the product itself almost irrelevant. I remember articles in the paper (80s I think) expressing shock and/or bemusement that someone would wear a shirt with "Tommy Hilfinger" printed boldly across the front. At that point such brands become an expression of stance rather than product quality, or perhaps the product was merely a way to broadcast the brand. For example Diesel jeans which can only be worn a small number of times, compared to levis which last much longer. And now it's come back to the starting point: seeking the brand, but for some level of quality assurance rather than lifestyle adherence.
mhh__ 6y ago
> [first paragraph] This is effectively being debated by proxy is most apple threads - i.e. It's easy to forget that we're debating this on HN, where even the least informed still have some idea what's going on whereas most consumers only information about a product is from very few sources and mostly advertising.
SkyMarshal 6y ago
>I've fallen back to pretty much relying on name brands as my placeholder for product quality I've fallen back on a combination of brand, country of manufacture, price, and to some extent if the company has its own retail presence outside of Amazon and other online or meatspace big box stores. For example... If the brand is good, the item is expensive, but it's made in China and sold on Amazon, I try to avoid. There's some risk it will be money wasted on something that will last just 3-6 months. Conversely if all of the above are true but the item is cheap, I'll buy it from Amazon, enjoy their fast delivery, and simply build into my expectations and budget that it will need to be replaced in 3-6months. This is what I've come to with headphones, for example. On the other hand, if the item is made in (not just designed in, but made in) the US, Japan, Korea, Germany, or some other Western European countries, then it matters less what the brand or retail venue is. For example, buying a room fan, power tool, or similar, I'll look for one with a motor made in US/Japan/Germany/etc. These are the best signals I've found to be available atm.
Kluny 6y ago
> Brands can get stocked in major retailers because you need decent products to make it through Walmart's buying process. Not only this - brands that get stocked at Walmart need to have considerable production capacity. I was involved in a manufacturing business that did great as long as we stayed b2c - but when we started doing b2b sales, even in small local shops, we got swamped rather quickly because we didn't have enough capacity. It's not much use finding a quality product if you can't buy it.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mrxd 6y ago
100% agree. I’d also add that people love to trash brands that produce substandard producers. Negative word of mouth spreads easier for more recognizable brands, and the company’s need to protect their reputation provides a level of assurance that doesn’t exist for anonymous producers.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  I disagree partially. Depending on the size of the corporation holding the brand, and thus available capital, it may be chump change for white/greenwashing via advertisement campaigns, cross media product placement, lawsuits, and employing whole armies of "reputation management* trolls...err professionals flooding any site with positive comments, burying anything else.
  - mrxd 6y ago
    Word of mouth is person-to-person, not online or media. Brand marketing is also different from product marketing.

pjc50 6y ago

If anything, the last few years of politics have convinced me that objective information is more likely to die out, replaced by advertising, brand recognition, and coercive tools.

kube-system 6y ago
I feel like this could be said any time over the past 100 years, at a minimum.
Grimm1 6y ago
An older friend of mine made the observation that really before the few large news networks and papers in the last 40-50 years objective information that everyone roughly agreed upon was not the norm. Yellow journalism, hearsay and rumors dominated common conversation. He observed that with the internet we're returning to what was this "normal" state with anybody being able to post something and gain widespread recognition, the difference of course being the rate at which this non-objective information travels and the better ability to weaponize it. I think, after looking into it a bit more, I agree with him and that our period of fairly objective news and political information and the general consensus that brought was the anomaly. This raises the question then how do we as society re-learn to cope with that and filter out non objective information because clearly we're not doing so well with it now. So, I don't think so much as it will die out as much as I think we need to develop abilities to separate wheat from chaff, stronger societal bullshit filters because truth will have a weaker signal.
- username90 6y ago
  How much of that was the American propaganda machine doing its job to keep the western world united against communism? The change we are seeing could just be the end of the cold war leading to slow return to normal and not due to technology at all.
  - Grimm1 6y ago
    I mean united news cycles predated the cold war and wasn't an isolated American phenomenon and I'm not talking about America but the world so I don't see how your opinion is relevant to the topic other than to stir the pot.
- coldpie 6y ago
  > I think, after looking into it a bit more, I agree with him and that our period of fairly objective news and political information and the general consensus that brought was the anomaly. This raises the question then how do we as society re-learn to cope with that and filter out non objective information because clearly we're not doing so well with it now. I don't know the answer, but my opinion is that we need to stop optimizing for views. I.e. kill the online advertising market. You can do your part by installing an ad blocker and paying for services you like with real money.
- yrimaxi 6y ago
  Nostalgia for the days when the NYT and co. could lie the whole nation into some war (or rather the people who read the NYT).
  - Grimm1 6y ago
    Your words not mine bud.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - pjc50 6y ago

MaxBarraclough 6y ago

> replaced by better objective information about products I don't have much to add here, but economists call this perfect information.

KirillPanov 6y ago
I have even less to add, but while we're griping, I think academic fields should recieve a demerit for every term they introduce that involves the adjective "perfect". For example, cryptographers: you get a demerit for using the phrase "perfect forward secrecy". Just "forward secrecy" would've done the job, no need to pat yourselves on the back...

bombcar 6y ago

Amusingly enough if you trace the history of brand names ... this is why they started! And this is the strength that the major retailers have against Amazon - if Amazon won't police (and they have problems with commingling counterfeit brands, too) then Walmart and Target will jump ahead.

fuball63 6y ago
I was of a similar mind this year, but when I went to Walmart's website, they had 3rd party sellers on there too. It is really annoying, especially with the pandemic, trying to sift through all the trash online. I ended up buying we webcam from BestBuy.com, because a webcam I got from Amazon was pay-for-review and was utter garbage. Just more evidence, to me, that the era of internet business models being "get everything online" (Amazon, Spotify, Steam) is closing, and the era of online aggregation as a product is just beginning.
- hanklazard 6y ago
  I've also found myself buying a lot of things from Best Buy, something I would have scoffed at 5-7 years ago. These days, I just want to know that I'm getting a genuine (vs replica) product and most of the time I can go pick-up my purchase same day, solving the "fast shipping" problem.
  - coldpie 6y ago
    Since NewEgg started up their 3rd party seller program, I've also switched to Best Buy. Running out of places to buy from that aren't flooded with trash.
    - ethbr0 6y ago
      Aka "the Etsy effect" (lowering the bar for new sellers results in a flood of bad-faith sellers)
    - mcpherrinm 6y ago
      BestBuy has added third party sellers online too: https://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/about/selling-on-marketplace/blt38484947eacf725e https://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/about/selling-on-marketplace/bl... Though they don’t seem to have many yet, I did run across it recently. In-store pickup items are still seemingly safe though.

TeMPOraL 6y ago

I myself am convinced that brand recognition is on borrowed time - that is, recognition of old brands may still work as useful filter, but new quality brands will be near-impossible to establish. The reason for that: we're being DDoSed with brands on e-commerce sites. For an increasing amount of product categories, you're going to find 10+ "brands" on Amazon that are selling the same white-label garbage class product, just with a different sticker and box/ad art. I've seen that in electronics, clothing, consumables. And while multiple brands under one company was a thing for a long time now (see e.g. how many stuff you eat is made by Nestlé or Unilever), there seems to be a qualitative difference here: white label goods meet e-commerce. "Brands" proliferate at the speed of computing.

joseph_grobbles 6y ago
Brands still arise out of that. I buy Spigen cases. Anker cables. If I want a low-cost but workable set of headphones for the kids, "MPOW" devices fit the bill. I know that Amazon Basics keyboards and mice will be satisfactory given the price. These do emerge.
- Pxtl 6y ago
  Yeah, that. My son has an MPow fightstick and it's a solid product. MPow is doing a good job establishing themselves as a reputable new brand for electronics.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  Similarly, Anker, Choetech, and a few others to a certain extent. Some of them come from the ashes of Alibaba rebrands, but a few start making decent products and are at least at what I'd consider "Belkin-level" but at a better price point.
  - ben1040 6y ago
    Even Belkin is now a Foxconn brand at this point, but at least I have owned plenty of products built by Foxconn that haven’t burned my house down.

Pxtl 6y ago

Unfortunately Amazon's UI is actually pretty hostile to this, too. I was trying to buy simple USB cables... After a pair of tablets were destroyed by a bad USB cable, I'm picky about usb micro cables. So I tried to search on Amazon for usb a to micro cables... And the brand filter didn't list many of the brands I was seeing in the resultset. Like, I know you have Monoprice and Belkin cables, I'm looking right at them! Why can I only filter to Chinese no-name brands and Amazonbasics?

14 6y ago
This comment caught my attention are bad cables really destroying your tablets? I ask because I literally power all my phones and tablets with cords I bought at the dollar store. Never had any problems. Have I just been lucky?
- Bedon292 6y ago
  Not sure about Micro, but a few years back a Google employee posted a bunch of info about bad USB C cables. Sadly I think it was on Google+ and gone now, but his reviews are still on Amazon [1]. There were certainly some really bad ones, missing resistors and things, so its quite possible on C at least. [1] https://smile.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AFLICGQRF6BRJGH2RRD4VGMB47ZA/ https://smile.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AFLICGQRF6...
  - 14 6y ago
    Well I guess I will consider myself lucky. I learned my lesson with an amazon power cord for my Lenovo laptop. It charges fine but the casing around the electronics melted due to it getting so hot. It is my kids laptop and could have literally started a fire on him. I bought a new one from Staples and now won’t buy any electronics like that from amazon.
  - Tempest1981 6y ago
    Maybe Benson Leung? https://www.extremetech.com/computing/225719-amazon-bans-cheap-usb-c-cables-in-wake-of-google-engineers-crusade https://www.extremetech.com/computing/225719-amazon-bans-che... Try https://usbccompliant.com/ https://usbccompliant.com/

dopylitty 6y ago

Brands aren't perfect either. For example Volvo had a reputation for making great safe cars. The brand is now owned by a company with a reputation for making cars that disintegrate and obliterate the occupants in crash tests. The same is true of Arc'teryx, Jaguar, and many other well known brands that have been sold off to companies with terrible reputations for quality. Ultimately the only way to guarantee quality would be to vote for politicians who support strong regulations and a strong regulatory apparatus.

rendall 6y ago
> Ultimately the only way to guarantee quality would be to vote for politicians who support strong regulations and a strong regulatory apparatus. Speaking as a socialist-leaning libertarian, I'mma have to take a hard disagree on this. Let the companies have a mix of terrible quality and great quality as they wish, and let the market itself decide which products and companies succeed or fail Let a private company, say, Consumer Reports or Vegan International, give their imprimatures to quality. A government, in this specific case of toy drones, is a bit heavy-handed, in my opinion. Would "quality specs" work? Would they be subject to political whims? Would a connected company be able to overwhelm the governmental department dedicated to the quality control of toy drones? Edit: I promise, despite the proximity of "socialist" to "libertarian" in my preamble, this is not an ideological stance. If you have a better idea, I will change my mind! I'm fine with a downvote, but don't just smash it because you disagree. Tell us why :)
- username90 6y ago
  There is a reason you aren't afraid of getting poisoned when you eat at restaurants, and it isn't because every restaurant owner cares about poisoning you but because the government have made the common practices which led to food poisoning illegal.
  - rendall 6y ago
    Here is an upvote for engaging. Kind of a non-sequitur, no? I was talking about toy drones.

nikanj 6y ago

Too bad buying the name brand on Amazon still gets you counterfeits and headaches

libraryatnight 6y ago
Yes, and even if the product seems like its legit - the manufacturers often won't honor warranties on products bought from Amazon if they don't have a formal relationship with them.

orev 6y ago

Given the counterfeit problem on Amazon, I have been using the retailer as a proxy instead. I feel much more comfortable buying things from a known retailer like Target or Walmart, since I can rely on them to at least do some kind of due diligence on the products they carry. I think this will be the way forward for these companies to stay in business as Amazon becomes overrun with junk.

mattmcknight 6y ago
Even though Walmart also has a marketplace full of mystery sellers, at least they still offer a simple filter at the outset to limit your results to only things they sell directly. At Amazon, you have to have already put another filter on your search results to see that option.
prepend 6y ago
This Christmas I used Walmart more than Amazon over 21 years of previous “Amazon christmases.” When I filtered for Walmart only my experience was great. No searching for ps5 and seeing Xbox ads, just stuff that matched my search. Also Walmart shipping was 1-2 days and free. So I guess logistics is getting figured out when Walmart free is beating Amazon prime.
jay_kyburz 6y ago
I use the retailer so that if the product breaks I can just walk back in and get my money back.
KirillPanov 6y ago
Same here but with Home Depot instead. They're pretty good at filtering out the absolute junk, because having customers return products is really expensive for brick+mortar retailers.

CapmCrackaWaka 6y ago

I know my comment will be lost in a sea of voices, but I need to share my experience _somewhere_ else other than amazon reviews. I got my fiancé two Christmas presents this year - both bought off Amazon. One was an electronic keyboard that was dead on arrival, the other was a snuggie type blanket that started falling apart yesterday. Both items had thousands of 5 star reviews. I usually go somewhere (anywhere) else besides Amazon because I have had bad experiences in the past, but this was the only place I could find the niche keyboard because it's an older model. I now have a firm rule that I will never order from Amazon again.

coldpie 6y ago
I've completely stopped ordering from Amazon, for three reasons: they have too much market power, they have serious ethics problems, and their 3rd party seller program has made the buying experience garbage. Welcome to the club.
- ethbr0 6y ago
  I've come full circle and only order books (usually used) or things I don't care if they're Chinese bargain-version off Amazon anymore. Target, or occasionally Walmart, gets what used to be Amazon's business from me.
  - coldpie 6y ago
    Even books aren't safe. Support your local booksellers! https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/amazon-caught-selling-counterfeits-of-publishers-computer-books-again/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/amazo...
    - dan-robertson 6y ago
      Even for non-counterfeit books, I’ve often got shit quality print-on-demand versions with plates that look like an inkjet printer running low on ink and with the letters having fuzzy boundaries.

ethbr0 6y ago

> There's still a lot to be said for established brands. Brands can afford widespread advertising... Established brands can do one other thing -- enforce on-ground quality assurance in China / manufacturing outsourcer Chinese factories are amazing. But they produce what you let them produce. 1000-units-of-X, only QA'd when they hit receiving port, are going to trend to crap. On the other hand, established brands have the financial and relationship muscle to actually inspect and cut things out earlier, and therefore can maintain a higher quality level on shelves

HPsquared 6y ago

Branding is an emergent phenomenon in nature as well, e.g. flowers of particular shapes to attract bees. The book "Alchemy" by Rory Sutherland goes into this.

yrimaxi 6y ago

> There's a somewhat pervasive idea that advertising and brand recognition are coercive tools that will ultimately die out, replaced by better objective information about products. I'm kind of partial to this idea myself. Based on what? Are people investing less in marketing than before?

prepend 6y ago
My personal experience is that many brands had a high markup on brand recognition and I used to be able to find better quality and value through no name brands that made good products. The internet is supposed to spread information well and with perfect information I should be able to differentiate true quality vs just a known brand signaling quality. I think the problem is that places like Amazon distort information (eg, tolerate crappy reviews) because it makes them more money. The bazaar model is supposed to have some positive feedback loops to incentivize positive events, but that’s drifting away. So I used to think that effective marketplaces would replace brands with disintermediation and perfect info. But not so much now. This is sort of a tl;dr for why I buy Apple. They have a huge markup for brand name, but it’s exhausting to me to try to evaluate what’s the best laptop this year and I can trust Apple to probably be pretty good.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

biztos 6y ago

I just made a pretty big purchase decision in a field (cameras) where there is a lot of competition and reviews carry a lot of weight. In the end, the information that helped me make up my mind was from video reviews by mostly well-known photography vloggers on YouTube. This is also something that could be messed with by unscrupulous marketers, but there is a strong counterbalance to those anti-patterns: the vloggers themselves are trying to build reputations, because "top photography vlogger" presumably pays better than 99% of all other work that involves photography. I'm not sure how much this counts as "better objective information" -- other than seeing an object move around in someone's hands you're mostly getting an opinion -- but I found it super helpful and could easily imagine this being the "future of purchase-decision influence" or something like it. For example here are three channels I used, with radically different styles: 1. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCknMR7NOY6ZKcVbyzOxQPhw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCknMR7NOY6ZKcVbyzOxQPhw 2. https://www.youtube.com/user/christopherfrost https://www.youtube.com/user/christopherfrost 3. https://www.youtube.com/user/JaredPolin https://www.youtube.com/user/JaredPolin

quasse 6y ago
> because "top photography vlogger" presumably pays better than 99% of all other work that involves photography. Just to be clear though (I work in a field that relies heavily on niche-specifc YouTubers for marketing) - the reason that being a "top niche blogger" pays so well is because companies pay them a lot to encourage favorable opinions of their product lines. I've seen amounts that are several multiples of my annual salary for fairly small market segment channels - and it's not explicit like "We are hiring you to post positive reviews of our products" because that would need to be disclosed. It's more along the lines of "We are nominally hiring you as a brand ambassador, you will visit our HQ and make a collaboration video". But of course, YouTubers aren't stupid, they're not going to post negative content about brands that are paying them even if it's theoretically for something else. This is the same problem that PC hardware review magazines had back in the day - companies that purchased a lot of advertising from the parent company just happened to never get negative coverage in review articles. You can't bite the hand that feeds you.
- 6y ago

tehjoker 6y ago

The problem is consumers are unorganized and people wanting to sell things can easily induce distortions in whatever recommender system by buying labor, companies, or products. You can only temporarily solve the problem before wealth demolishes objective feedback systems.

gumby 6y ago

> There's still a lot to be said for established brands. Thus the loop comes full circle. Originally the idea of a brand ("burned" -- burned into the hide of an animal or a piece of wood) was a way to label the provider in the hope that people would learn which providers were trustworthy and had high quality. This extended into manufactured products once printed packaging become popular (logos and labels, starting with low-input goods like tea). Then sometime in the 20th century people figured out that they could use mass advertising to build the brand (by then just a label) itself, sometimes even rendering the product itself almost irrelevant. I remember articles in the paper (80s I think) expressing shock and/or bemusement that someone would wear a shirt with "Tommy Hilfinger" printed boldly across the front. At that point such brands become an expression of stance rather than product quality, or perhaps the product was merely a way to broadcast the brand. For example Diesel jeans which can only be worn a small number of times, compared to levis which last much longer. And now it's come back to the starting point: seeking the brand, but for some level of quality assurance rather than lifestyle adherence.

mhh__ 6y ago

> [first paragraph] This is effectively being debated by proxy is most apple threads - i.e. It's easy to forget that we're debating this on HN, where even the least informed still have some idea what's going on whereas most consumers only information about a product is from very few sources and mostly advertising.

SkyMarshal 6y ago

>I've fallen back to pretty much relying on name brands as my placeholder for product quality I've fallen back on a combination of brand, country of manufacture, price, and to some extent if the company has its own retail presence outside of Amazon and other online or meatspace big box stores. For example... If the brand is good, the item is expensive, but it's made in China and sold on Amazon, I try to avoid. There's some risk it will be money wasted on something that will last just 3-6 months. Conversely if all of the above are true but the item is cheap, I'll buy it from Amazon, enjoy their fast delivery, and simply build into my expectations and budget that it will need to be replaced in 3-6months. This is what I've come to with headphones, for example. On the other hand, if the item is made in (not just designed in, but made in) the US, Japan, Korea, Germany, or some other Western European countries, then it matters less what the brand or retail venue is. For example, buying a room fan, power tool, or similar, I'll look for one with a motor made in US/Japan/Germany/etc. These are the best signals I've found to be available atm.

Kluny 6y ago

> Brands can get stocked in major retailers because you need decent products to make it through Walmart's buying process. Not only this - brands that get stocked at Walmart need to have considerable production capacity. I was involved in a manufacturing business that did great as long as we stayed b2c - but when we started doing b2b sales, even in small local shops, we got swamped rather quickly because we didn't have enough capacity. It's not much use finding a quality product if you can't buy it.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mrxd 6y ago

100% agree. I’d also add that people love to trash brands that produce substandard producers. Negative word of mouth spreads easier for more recognizable brands, and the company’s need to protect their reputation provides a level of assurance that doesn’t exist for anonymous producers.

LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
I disagree partially. Depending on the size of the corporation holding the brand, and thus available capital, it may be chump change for white/greenwashing via advertisement campaigns, cross media product placement, lawsuits, and employing whole armies of "reputation management* trolls...err professionals flooding any site with positive comments, burying anything else.
- mrxd 6y ago
  Word of mouth is person-to-person, not online or media. Brand marketing is also different from product marketing.