I will go with branding and denounce the marketing effort. Why? The simple reason is Brands Are More Important than Products.
After the Second World War many new products became available in the most advanced countries, from the most essential appliances in a home, such as washing machines and refrigerators, to ready-made soups and aerosol cleaners. For the first time the middle class had access to those products that would have a lasting impact on their quality of life. Moving from a washboard to an automatic washing machine or from the blocks of ice in the icebox to a refrigerator now became the desire of homemakers the world over. Consumers had to have these new household devices, at any price. No matter the brand, the important thing was the product itself and its incredible features. These new products are sold singly. It was enough to inform consumers about a product’s existence and its mode of use to achieve good distribution and a competitive price. Demand exceeds supply, and it is not necessary for companies to establish customers; it is just about accumulating buyers. But within a few years’ things start to change. With the extraordinary economic development of the 1960s, a powerful consumer society emerges. Demand continues to grow, but supply is still growing. It is now easier to manufacture than to sell, and as the market tightens, it is no longer sufficient to report on the product’s existence; it is necessary to differentiate oneself from competition through advertising, marketing, promotions, public relations and any other available means of communication. As a result of this situation, brand began to play a relevant role, but the development of the brand had only just begun.
Over the years, technology products have become more and more like consumer products. It is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between a product and its competition, and emotion is gradually gaining ground in advertising messages, obscuring the concrete attributes of products. In a very short time, both technological advances and physical differences are being swept away by competition, making it impossible to base communication on the marginal advantage that would have once made a product unique and distinct from others in its category. The products themselves are no longer attractive per se and must take refuge in the perceived values of the brands that shelter them. Beginning in the late 1970s the consumer, who up to that point had not been accorded much value in the marketing process for products, began to play a relevant role. Because it is no longer enough to have good distribution, reasonable quality, and a competitive price to sell a product. Now the consumer must also be seduced by the brand, and that requires new strategies in which empathy and emotionality are basic factors.
A Dior or Chanel party dress is not the same as a run-of-the-mill party dress. And it is not just about the quality of the fabric or the elegance of the design. Beyond the tangible physical characteristics of the product, the brand gives the user a touch of intangible glamor that really makes the difference. It was fashion designers who first discovered the secret of brand power. They realized that customers could fall in love with brands to the point that they even forget about the reality of the products. In fact, in their fashion shows, they display impossible garments, which never have much to do with the ones they then sell in their stores. Collections build a fantasy world that enhances the brand but whose wares we will never see out in the real world—unless it be on the red carpet, where big stars of the movie industry might sport such spectacular designs free of charge.
At first, brands such as Christian Dior, Balenciaga and Coco Chanel focused on haute couture, only accessible to a handful of privileged women worldwide, but then, like Yves Saint Laurent or Pierre Cardin, they expanded their range of products to prêt à porter and later to accessories, shoes, handbags, belts and jewellery, and from there to perfumes and cosmetics. Some brands like Armani and Bulgari have transcended the borders of fashion, even going so far as to manage restaurants and luxury hotels.

The world of fashion and luxury has always been a pioneer in modes of communication, perhaps because the essence of luxury is subtlety, which has much more to do with intuition and empathy than with the marginal advantages of products. However, there is a paragon in the business world to aid our understanding of the phenomenon of transforming products into brands. It is Virgin, the first company born entirely as a brand, without having any product behind it. In fact, it was originally a second-hand record store. It would later become a record company, book publisher, drugstore, airline, soft-drink maker, railroad, bank, insurance agency, travel agency, and hundreds of other enterprises whose only common link is the Virgin brand and the imprint of its adventurous creator, Richard Branson.
Virgin grew up in the late seventies and early eighties, at virtually the same time as Starbucks, Nike, and Apple, which launched its flagship product, the Macintosh, in 1984. All these companies were from the beginning aware of the great importance of brand for the future development of their business. A shoe is an object with specific characteristics relating to its fabric, flexibility, durability and many other attributes that we can either perceive or imagine seeing, touching or experiencing on our feet. We can draw a conclusion from its benefits through our experience and our logical judgment. However, the Nike brand logo that is so familiar to us is just a stroke on a white or black background. It conveys another type of emotional value related to the world of sport, with images of elite athletes and how they look in their sports garments, making us feel that we also form part of their achievements; we identify with them in their victories and their defeats. The spirit of sport, as expressed by Phil Knight, is the true value of that beloved brand, whose logo many Nike employees wear tattooed on their calves. It is a testament of love that goes far beyond the concrete benefit we can get from any product.
The commitment of customers to brands has become so strong that they have no problem displaying them on their own body. Chanel, Dolce & Gabbana, Armani, Nike, and many others are now stamping their logos on the clothes that their customers proudly carry. This was unthinkable some years ago, when brand names were hidden in jacket linings or inside shirt collars. The values and attributes of brands that constitute the essence of their personality are mimicked by the values and attributes of the audience to which they are directed. Brands try to be their customers’ soul mates; they attempt to generate empathy and to establish intimate and lasting relationships. Thus, when we choose a brand, it is because we identify with it. Moreover, the brand itself identifies us—it establishes our worth relative to the world around us. Brands help us to define our new status or statuses. These are no longer just socioeconomic but also technological, political, and environmental. When we buy a certain brand of smartphone such as an iPhone, we are not only buying a smartphone that in addition to sending and receiving calls and messages serves us as a planner, a watch, a calculator, etc., providing us with an endless array of applications of varying usefulness in our daily life. It also serves us to express our level of modernity and our impressive access to technology. In choosing among other innumerable brands we find the reflection of our environmental concern, our sexual inclinations, our social and political leanings, religious identities—whatever are the parameters characteristic of our lifestyle. To achieve this, brands humanize themselves and participate in all kinds of social issues that affect us.
According to BrandIndex, the company that measures the perception levels of thousands of brands around the world, the four companies most loved by their customers in 2016 were, in this order, Google, YouTube, Samsung and Facebook.
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