For example, clothing and cars are typically heavily branded. They typically have prominent displays of brands and consumers tend to have a high degree of brand awareness/loyalty for these items.
Other items, like houses and fresh produce, arent heavily branded. They dont prominently display their brands and consumers generally dont show much brand loyalty, or are even aware of what company built their house or grew their vegetables.
Why is this? What characteristics make a product susceptible to branding?
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Clothing and cars (and phones and watches and stuff) are mass produced items and intended to be shown off to people so people like showing off that what they have is made by a “high tier” designer.
I don’t think large scale house designers really even exist, so no one would know the “brand” of the house even if they saw it. Houses you can also kind of tell how expensive it is based purely on seeing it- the average person probably cannot easily tell apart how much clothes, watches, phones, cars etc cost without some indication who designed those items, while you can tell how much a house costs relative to those around it just based off how it looks (obviously location matters too, like a normal 4 bedroom house in Palo Alto will cost more than a mansion in Montana).
With fresh produce, it would be basically impossible to show off its branding, given that you’re probably cutting it up and mixing it with other things which would make it indistinguishable from any other brand
You’re loosely describing, for unbranded products what is known as commodity products, or just ‘commodities’.
Commodities are products that are generally just about identical to each other no matter who produces it. We usually think of this in big terms, like wheat, soy beans, oil (petroleum), natural gas, gold ore, and such
But lots of products fit into a similar vein, where it doesn’t really matter who the producer is, they produce a near identical product to each other.
The celery you buy at the store is not gonna be much different if you buy it in city A vs city B or if it came from farm A or farm B. Celery is all the same
In this vein, there isn’t a lot to gain from branding your specific product (ok, there actually is, but its super hard/expensive to do). Jeff’s celery isn’t going to be better or different than Mark’s celery
So essentially products use branding as a way to differentiate themselves from others producing similar but probably slightly different products (or it could be very dif.
Say you like hot sauce, and there are 5 different types of “Louisiana style hot sauce” on the shelf, each brand may be slightly different and maybe you like one vs the other, its got more heat or less vinegar or thicker or thinner. You know to buy that brand.
Branding works when you want a specific product, from a specific manufacturer, because their product is in some way different than others… or their marketing has somehow convinced you it is different or better or whatever it takes to get your money.
I worked at the produce section in Costco and we would always be ordering from different brands for the same product – it all depended on who was able to supply the quantity we needed at the price we wanted. It’s a product that has a relatively short shelf-life, has inconsistent quality depending on the season and is susceptible to shortages thanks to uncooperative weather, so for both the store and the customers, it was very much “take what you can get”. If a you don’t like Kirkland toilet paper, you can just wait until Charmin toilet paper is available and buy a few month’s supply – but you can’t exactly do that with fresh lettuce. If you want to make a salad, you buy whatever’s at the store at most a few days in advance.
And for the most part, people judge produce by the produce itself. People will dig through a giant pallet of strawberries that all came in the same day from the same place and try to find that one container that’s absolutely perfect. It doesn’t matter what the label says, the only important thing is whether or not the strawberries themselves look good. For any brand, there’s bound to be some bruises, differences in size and ripeness, and the occasional rotting.
As far as housing goes, I think you’re more likely to notice branding in a brand new neighborhood when they’re trying to fill it up with new buildings, but I feel like they don’t want to be their name to be too prominent a few years later when houses start needing maintenance. I don’t mean to solely imply shoddy workmanship, but also these brands can’t really control what homeowners do in their houses or what contractors they hire after the fact. And if they branded your house like a giant billboard, I’m sure the first thing many people would do is get rid of the branding.
In houses it’s used to obscure the branding in the first place. I live in a Toll Brothers house (I know this because the lazy bastards buy staircases already assembled which have markings on them) as do thousands of other people.
They only make about a dozen different houses, picked from a catalog (I’m not making this up) and have made hundreds, and they’d rather I not know there are 20 carbon copies of my house near me. I’m supposed to feel unique.
In fact, my house, built in 2003 is identical to the house my friend grew up in built in 1986.
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