> and the point about the non branded is kind of a straw man. just > 'cause levi's are a bit better than the bloke down the market stall > doesn't make it right. the point is that levi's et al are not really > good products for the money, and they don't care and won't care untill
Hey, I like Levi's! There's a difference between the brandname thing and the globalisation thing. Brands have been qith us for a while, and people have been buying brands for the sake of the brand for hundreds of years. It's just that there were more brands then, and that such behaviour tended to apply to the luxuries of the rich, and later to the luxuries of the middle class. The globalisation of brands (and other stuff) is newer, and kind of unrelated. Once you've globalised production, distribution, sales etc, it kind of makes sense to globalise the brand. I think it works this way round and not the other way. If I'm a widget maker with a factory in Wigan, it's going to be difficult to compete for the Tokyo market against a Nagasaki based widget maker, because I have to ship stuff a long way and there aren't many people in the UK with a good idea of what color the Japanese like their widgets. But once I buy out that Nagasaki widget maker, I can compete much more effectively, but it becomes more efficient to homogenise aspects of my Wigan and Nagasaki products. The brand is part of this. -- Jonathan Peterson Technical Manager, Unified Ltd, +44 (0)20 7383 6092 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
