Monday, May 21, 2012
Brands, not trademarks?
The NYT has Adam Davidson on making
choices in an information-oversaturated world. It doesn’t use the word “trademark,” but
recites the standard justifications for trademark protection, focusing on the
signaling effect: a well-known brand or endorser supposedly guarantees that the
producer invests in quality, or at least is successful enough that it has the
money to spend on showy advertising, though as Davidson points out some of
those signals can be easy to feign in the absence of investment in less visible
actual quality. Particularly interesting
to me was that one of the instances of relying on brand signals involves using
an aggregator—Amazon—as an indicator of quality, rather than a smaller site
supposedly offering the underlying, most likely branded, product at a lower price. I myself don’t know why fulfillment by Amazon
would matter; I’ve gotten scratched DVDs from Amazon sellers (curse you, last disc of Season 2 of The Wire!), and a good
aftermarket ceiling fan from an eBay seller (a high-rated one, true!) at a
hundred dollars below other offers. The incident Davidson reports also reinforces the point that high price is a (feignable) signal of
high quality in itself.
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