eli5: Why are some classes of products heavily branded while others arent?

Question

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?

In: 0

Answer 1

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.