Consumers don’t care for advertising. They want the real dope on goods and services from people who’ve tried them. This is what they can get thanks to social media and the always-on connectedness of today’s world. And this has a profound effect on branding. Branding is typically about creating perceptions and predisposing people to like your product. But today, branding is all about what people are saying about your products, not what you’re saying. This article talks about ‘de-branding,’ and if correct, points to a very different future for what differentiates products.

The brand that screams the loudest no longer commands the most attention; the one that offers something genuinely useful does.

When you boil it down, value is all that people want.

… go back to the original notion of a brand. Fine-tune your product’s quality, design, and its durability. Become a producer of shoes again instead of surrogate spirituality. It will make your life, and consumers’ lives, simpler. Don’t throw a new product on the market if it’s not intrinsically better and more durable than what already exists. We don’t need more branding; we need fewer, better-quality products. People will find you.

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