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Managementlitteratur

The real success story of branding in recent decades has been the  way in which companies have used their brands to turn the satisfaction   of complex and even spiritual needs into commercial transactions.  Once people have reached a level of wealth where all their simple  needs are fully met, where they lack nothing which is essential for the  satisfactory continuation of their daily lives, one might imagine that  their surplus time and energy would then be expended on fulfilling  higher, spiritual and intellectual needs. One might also imagine that  commerce has no part to play in this pursuit.

But as people in richer countries have moved beyond basic wants,  so companies have kept pace with their increasingly complex and  intangible desires, attaching the promise of status, peer approval, tranquillity,   happiness, wisdom, intelligence, sex appeal, long life, fitness,  youthfulness, to their branded products. Now that every desire in our  waking lives is fulfilled, brands manage to sell us our dreams. Brands  continue to exist and generate huge profits because that is the only way  in which consumers who own everything they want can be stimulated  to carry on consuming as if they still needed things.