In Gurinder’s post about “Are Brands Still Necessary,” he discusses the idea that there is no need for brands now a day.  In history, brands labels were to assure the consumer of a level of quality one wasn’t assured by other products.  Gurinder compares the Nissan GT-R to the Porshe 911 Turbo and the Ferrari 458 Italia.  All of these have expensive price tags of $100,000, $182,095 and $237,259 respectively and all with similar performance.  The cost of each of these cars will give you the same amount of engine power, control and head turns as you cruise down the road, but why are all three in different price categories? How is a price set on these cars if all of them bring similar performance to the consumer? Each brand has accumulated respect over many years and is allowed to set the price at whatever they want because of the decal they put on the front of the car.

I do agree with Gurinder that brands do not have a purpose anymore; however, there are some cases when they do. When a consumer goes out to buy sunglasses, they want quality glasses that have polarized lenses and are comfortable on the face.  Oakley and Ray Ban are major retailers that will provide this for you. Other lower end glass companies such as Suncloud and Sunbelt are examples of companies who will sell you similar glasses with extremely low quality material. As Gurinder stated that most companies maintain a similar level of quality, for most products there is a large gap between the top quality and the next level below them.

Brands still play a major role in today’s society because many people are ‘snobs’ and want to have the best brand known to people even if they can get that same product for half the price. However, in most cases, the difference between the best and second best are located on two different sides of the spectrum.  This causes many to stray away from lower end products and spend a little bit extra on brands that are known to assure quality. Brand labels will attract customers because they are assured a level of quality others may not be able to provide you with.

News Source: https://blogs.ubc.ca/gurindersidhu/2014/10/04/are-brands-still-necessary/

Picture Source: http://blog.hrpartners.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/brandIdentity2.jpg