[masona]

>The quality of the shoe you buy is the necessary determinant of how well it will perform.

Is that really true if the mind is what makes it so?

Product advertising convinces you that you can do a thing, so you succeed. Emotions are much more powerful than rational thought and in the case of the shoe, can be a catalyst for a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Performance is almost never purely mechanical with products that interface directly with the human body.

[elefanten]

Yes, it's necessarily so. The quality of the shoe determines how well the shoe performs.

Whether the customer performs better based on the (sub)conscious influence of the brand on the shoe is a different question entirely. But it's not one that anyone in these comments has provided the faintest whiff of evidence for.

So far, we've had romanticized assertions about emotional impacts nobody has measured.

The real question is whether this advertising process produces any unique benefits vs. a more product information based process. People found motivation and inspiration in things before the rise of modern branding. IMO, the presumption should be that sources of ephemeral emotional inspiration could be replaced without requiring the attention-hijacking form of advertising.