[jonahss]

There's another important element: the ability to judge quality.

Many people (especially baby boomers) learned a shortcut, by using brand name as a proxy for quality of goods. The problem with this is that all those brands eventually outsourced and sold themselves and cashed in on the old brand quality association. Cheapening and cheapening as the producers realized that people still bought their product no matter what the quality was. Also, people equate flair and style of product with the quality, because they aren't actually good judges of quality. You can find many cheap junk products today that retain a poor skeuomorphic shadow of their former glory. At some point consumers learned "well if it has the shiny chrome it's a good one" and producers learned they could add a chunk of shiny plastic and people would prefer their product.

Brand names are worthless now, for the most part, and if you're not good at judging quality yourself, it can be a difficult consumer landscape to navigate.