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Coca Cola sells water with flavouring and quite astonishing amounts of sugar. Apple sells nice devices made by what might as well be slave labour. Both are pro

Coca Cola sells water with flavouring and quite astonishing amounts of sugar. Apple sells nice devices made by what might as well be slave labour. Both are propped up - actually maintained - by huge and vastly expensive brand management strategies. The criticisms of individual campaigns here are missing the point. It's not about micro ad spend, but the perception of value and manipulation of behaviour created by the combined effect of multiple PR and advertising efforts - which include traditional print and TV/radio ad campaigns, guided advertorials disguised as news in the MSM, interviews with prominent figures, political campaigns of more or less obvious relevance to the core business activity, state, national, and international political lobbying, direct political campaign donations, advertorials masquerading as "freelance" journalism and blogging, managed astroturfing on social media, shareholder relationship management, product placements in movies and music promo videos, articles about commercial visual design elements in trade journals. And on and on. That perception of value is - unsurprisingly - extremely valuable. And it's very much a US way of doing business. Instead of producing products that are inherently superior, produce something that is functional but glossily packaged, brand it as a premium lifestyle commodity, and charge exorbitant prices for it., The prices are traditionally far out of proportion to its actual utility. In fact real utility may well be negative - see also diabetes and any number of other health issues, depression associated with social media use, debt-driven spending on lifestyle products. Etc. So the rent seeking comes from a kind of cultural squatting. There is value in dominating discourse in all of these different ways, because discourse and narrative define markets and ultimately control behaviour. And while this is happening other kinds of discourse - which may well have more real utility - are diminished at best and crowded out at worst. So in this case it doesn't matter if Uber "wasted" their money. Uber have their own branding thing going, and explicit ad spend is a tiny part of that. And even if all online ad spending ended tomorrow, a small number of corporations would have a difficult time for a while, but the marketing industry as a whole would inevitably interpret the change as minor damage and route around it.

Ericson2314 6y ago
Because the ideology of capitalism is "cooridation failure, whatever", It sure would be nice to find a way for one of those companies to freeload off the culture-shaping the others do, and bring the whole enterprise crashing down!
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Trademark laws exist to prevent such freeloading. In this context, they ensure only the ones paying for the culture-shaping can benefit from it.
mschuster91 6y ago
> Both are propped up - actually maintained - by huge and vastly expensive brand management strategies. In the case of Coca Cola, I agree - in the case of Apple, not at all. "Keyboardgate" aside, their products are vastly superior to the competition in build quality and life time. A typical Windows laptop is unusable after two, three years (almost all are made from plastic which breaks or looks extremely ugly rather sooner than later), and has next to no resale value while in contrast even old cheesegrater Mac Pro's fetch many hundreds of dollars today. iPhones are supplied with firmware updates far longer than most Android phones outside the flagship Pixel line are. OS X is, while it has gotten locked down a fair bit over the last years, still way better than Windows as it doesn't do tracking bullshit and start menu ads and decently better than Linux because no matter which device, stuff usually Just Works (tm) without having to fiddle for hours to get something as basic as a Bluetooth headset working. Apple built themselves a loyal following with pure quality superiority over the competition, unlike HP or Dell who are only surviving because of enterprises who follow the "no one got fired for buying IBM" line. And that doesn't even touch that it's Apple who's at the forefront of innovation. iPods, iPhones, iPads, Apple Watch, AirPods, now the M1 CPU - these entire device classes were created by Apple. When was the last time you heard about something truly innovative from the Windows/MS/Google side of IT? Only thing I can remember is the Google Glass. What Apple is doing is not a "brand management strategy" per se - it is delivering actual value and innovation instead of rent-seeking. And for what it's worth Tesla are doing the same thing.
- megameter 6y ago
  Apple isn't repairable. Apple devices have high prices simply because of the brand ecosystem. Old Thinkpads use commodity parts - but they command good prices because they are repairable. Marketing the new thing is what Apple does. It is good at it. That is not the entire spectrum of customer value.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    Thinkpads are pretty much the worst form factor for a laptop that doesn't transition into "toy" space. Source: forced to use one daily. If I could get a Mac laptop running Linux but with the input smarts of the Apple trackpad and keyboard, I would in a heartbeat.
shadowgovt 6y ago
This analysis excludes glossy packaging and status signalling from the inherent superiority, when (in terms of overall market value) they're part of the superiority.
- xapata 6y ago
  And in Coca-Cola's case (among others) the advertising is much of what creates the value. When you know it's a Coke, it tastes better. I've had a lifetime of absorbing ads that make me think of good things whenever I know I'm drinking a Coke.
kortilla 6y ago
That’s not rent seeking by any accepted definition.

Ericson2314 6y ago

Because the ideology of capitalism is "cooridation failure, whatever", It sure would be nice to find a way for one of those companies to freeload off the culture-shaping the others do, and bring the whole enterprise crashing down!

TeMPOraL 6y ago
Trademark laws exist to prevent such freeloading. In this context, they ensure only the ones paying for the culture-shaping can benefit from it.

mschuster91 6y ago

> Both are propped up - actually maintained - by huge and vastly expensive brand management strategies. In the case of Coca Cola, I agree - in the case of Apple, not at all. "Keyboardgate" aside, their products are vastly superior to the competition in build quality and life time. A typical Windows laptop is unusable after two, three years (almost all are made from plastic which breaks or looks extremely ugly rather sooner than later), and has next to no resale value while in contrast even old cheesegrater Mac Pro's fetch many hundreds of dollars today. iPhones are supplied with firmware updates far longer than most Android phones outside the flagship Pixel line are. OS X is, while it has gotten locked down a fair bit over the last years, still way better than Windows as it doesn't do tracking bullshit and start menu ads and decently better than Linux because no matter which device, stuff usually Just Works (tm) without having to fiddle for hours to get something as basic as a Bluetooth headset working. Apple built themselves a loyal following with pure quality superiority over the competition, unlike HP or Dell who are only surviving because of enterprises who follow the "no one got fired for buying IBM" line. And that doesn't even touch that it's Apple who's at the forefront of innovation. iPods, iPhones, iPads, Apple Watch, AirPods, now the M1 CPU - these entire device classes were created by Apple. When was the last time you heard about something truly innovative from the Windows/MS/Google side of IT? Only thing I can remember is the Google Glass. What Apple is doing is not a "brand management strategy" per se - it is delivering actual value and innovation instead of rent-seeking. And for what it's worth Tesla are doing the same thing.

megameter 6y ago
Apple isn't repairable. Apple devices have high prices simply because of the brand ecosystem. Old Thinkpads use commodity parts - but they command good prices because they are repairable. Marketing the new thing is what Apple does. It is good at it. That is not the entire spectrum of customer value.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  Thinkpads are pretty much the worst form factor for a laptop that doesn't transition into "toy" space. Source: forced to use one daily. If I could get a Mac laptop running Linux but with the input smarts of the Apple trackpad and keyboard, I would in a heartbeat.

shadowgovt 6y ago

This analysis excludes glossy packaging and status signalling from the inherent superiority, when (in terms of overall market value) they're part of the superiority.

xapata 6y ago
And in Coca-Cola's case (among others) the advertising is much of what creates the value. When you know it's a Coke, it tastes better. I've had a lifetime of absorbing ads that make me think of good things whenever I know I'm drinking a Coke.

kortilla 6y ago

That’s not rent seeking by any accepted definition.