Avoid brand obsession

While all of us have our preferences for what we want to wear or drive, prices are often inflated beyond reason just because the product comes from a company which is defined as high end by consumers.

All of us know this, but the trick is not actually continuously falling for it.

One little Marxist exercise on getting more conscious about your spending habits is concentrating on what we care about the most - the true labor value of a given product.

Is what you want to buy truly made by experts, in decent conditions - therefore relatively justifying the increase in prices - or is the company you’re buying from using their brand status to get away with exploitative low skill labour?

This is not to undermine low skill labour - but to the opposite - a simple trick which tells you the real worth of that given product - and just how much the brand sells on quality vs advertising.

Karl Marx didn’t write about advertising per say, but his writing on alienation has a lot to say about the process of advertising.

He said - and I quote - that ‘selling is the process of alienation’.

Because we are underpaid we can not afford to buy everything in the market - so the sellers have to compete - and why compete based on quality and use value - when you can compete based on who can build a stronger and more recognizable brand?

Don’t fall for it all the time, it’s a bloody meme at this point.