"Men who know medicine recommend aspirin. The trouble is, they never recommend Bayer by name — despite the billions of free samples we send them... because aspirin is aspirin, darn it!" note
One of the more Common Fan Fallacies that exists is that products that carry brand names are higher in quality, taste better, last longer, and so on than lesser known names or even generic products. Related to this is the idea that, the more expensive something is, the better it will be. Neither of these ideas is necessarily so... it is often proved that the only real difference between High Priced Brand X and Generic Product Y is the name on the label.
Sometimes, it is true that the more expensive product might have been made with higher-quality materials, thus justifying the price tag as opposed to the off-brand—but this isn't always the case, as many store-brand items have the exact same ingredients-list. Indeed, this trope is all about how people prefer the name brands, when the difference just isn't there. Also, it is very common for many big name companies to make a generic/store brand version of the product as well, which means that the only differences are the price and packaging.
Can be a form of Up Marketing if the brand name is intentionally designed to appeal to wealthy shoppers. See also Conspicuous Consumption, when flaunting the brand name gives the perception of class. Also related to the Placebo Effect, in that the belief of an item's better quality may be enough to make it really seem better.
Compare Expensive Glass of Crap, when switching the labels on a cheap and an expensive product is all it takes to convince would-be snobs that the cheap one is better quality.
Examples:
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Advertising
- The entire designer clothing industry hinges on this. Addressed in Cracked's "4 Celebrity Products That Are Proof People Will Buy Anything
".
For $120, you can own a plain white T-shirt "designed" by Kanye West, because the limit of his design prowess seems to be looking at a Hanes catalog and saying, "Just make that, only for $120 and with my name on it." It doesn't grant wishes or give you super rapping powers, although it does imbue you with the ability to instantly regret its purchase. - The cosmetics industry has come under criticism a few times for this. It is fairly common for products of widely varying brands and prices to be completely identical for the simple reason that they are all repackagings of the same product from a single supplier.
- Any medication, really. Legally, a generic medicine must be the exact same thing as the brand name to be considered a generic; the only differences are "intangibles" such as the shape and color of the pill. And yet, countless consumers will gladly pay several times more to get the brand name because they've convinced themselves that the generic just doesn't work as well. Name-brand painkillers are particularly subject to this.
- In some cases, if the inert ingredients are different between the brand names and generics, then one can be better than the other. A common example is if one don't contain food coloring - the alternative option is preferable if you're allergic to that ingredient.
- Differences in the inert ingredients (such as the binding of the pill) may affect the rate at which the active ingredients are absorbed into the body, causing the exact same type and amount of medication to have a somewhat different effect. Thankfully, there are very few medications where this effect is prominent enough to matter (Synthroid being the most commonly seen example).
- A famous example in the Philippines is RiteMED, a subsidiary of local pharmaceutical giant Unilab whose products are generic medications sold under the same moniker and is best remembered for its memetic "May RiteMED ba nito?"note commercial featuring the late Susan Roces. Ads for RiteMED assure the public that they are just as effective as their name-brand counterparts but are sold for much cheaper.
- Most times people think widely recognized audio equipment brands sound better, which in practice it's not always the case. Audio devices from widely recognized and expensive brands are usually very good, they are complex, incorporate more research into electronics and acoustics than cheaper brands, have finer controls and cooler designs. This is especially true for Headphones, as the sound is more intimate by nature so the listener can hear the flaws of the product more easily. As audiophile Youtube personality DankPods points out numerous times in videos, you can get good headphones for under $50 from established and generic brands, but anything over that price-point, and the generics have a hard time keeping up. Of course, for something like a cheap tabletop radio, which are rather basic in their electronics, the winner is the one who used the best materials in their construction. Between a cheap brand with solid wood or MDF cases, polymer speakers, solid plastic buttons, aluminum face panels, versus a more renowned brand with a plastic case, very few controls, and paper speakers, it becomes obvious that the brand had no say in the sound quality.
- The consistent exception to the above headphones rule is Beats headphones, which sell at a huge markup purely because they were endorsed by Dr Dre and are massively popular because of that fact. Audiophiles who have compared them to other headphones say they are good, but not really much better than some headphones that can be had for under $100, instead, they are mostly used as a status symbol.
- Lots of cable manufacturers say that their most expensive and best cables and connectors are gold-plated so it allows for unparalleled performance and visual quality compared to aluminum. When it comes to resistivity and conductivity, gold is inferior to common copper and not much better than aluminum. Not that it matters, because digital cables (HDMI, DisplayPort) don't care about this, and are digital signals that are mostly impervious to outsight environmental effects (something analog signals, such as SCART, Component, and RCA, do suffer from).
- The reason gold-plated connectors are used in high-end electronics at all is because Copper, while being an unparalleled conductor, tarnishes very easily, especially in damp air, and copper oxide is a semiconductor, leading to the whole slew of weird contact effects and parasitic noises.note Gold, while a somewhat poorer conductor, doesn't tarnish at all, and, being very soft, actually flows under the normal forces in most connections, ensuring a perfect contact and airtight seal, which protects other, not so resistant materials. Now, the "oriented strands" and "presounded cables" on the other hand... That's just pure bullshit.
- It should be noted that when digital connections get noise, it has to be pretty bad before it will have any effect on the quality of audio or video, since digital sugnals are either on or off, and it has to completely flip a bit to be noticeable. Since most protocols have error correction as a part of their standards, multiple bits close together in time and won't leave a perceptible difference for the end-user. Essentially, they either work, or they don't. This is why expensive HDMI cables are equivalent to snakeoil, as their markup is purely to lure customers who don't have an understanding of the technology.
- A process exists to make cheaper diamonds that are "synthetic", only in the fact that they were made in a lab and not dug up from the ground. These "synthetic" diamonds actually tend to be flawless, since they are pure carbon and lack the chemical impurities that occur in natural diamonds, and thus technically are "better" than natural diamonds, in addition to costing far less than natural ones. Nevertheless, the international diamond cartels have managed to keep diamond prices high, in part by portraying lab-produced "synthetic" diamonds as being somehow "lesser" than natural diamonds, and thus not suitable to their "elite" clientele who naturally would never think of buying "artificials".note
Fanfics
- Between the Lines (MrQuestionMark): Averted. In Chapter 1:
"She may have been a high-class rich girl but even Shokuhou knew that there was no point going to buy the most expensive pencils and pens when there were cheaper options that lasted longer and were half the price."
- Inverted in Once More With Feeling Illusor Meaneld where Shinra's artificial materia is garbage compared to natural materia as they can't grow stronger. A natural Ice materia can learn the stronger versions of Blizzard but an artificial Blizzard materia can't.
- In Delenda Est, "Ollivander" wands are (rightfully) seen as far superior to "Wanda & Wandel's" and thus the latter goes out of business.
Films — Animation
- Played straight in the animated film Foodfight! (2012), where Brand X is the villain and several advertising characters have cameos.
Films — Live-Action
- In The Night We Never Met, Sam Lester is a chef who runs a high-class delicatessen. He's constantly trying to convince his customers that the only difference between the less-expensive but still-high-quality domestic products he sells and the expensive, brand-name imports is the fact that a) they are imported and b) they are brand names. Most of his customers couldn't care less and buy the imports for the "prestige" factor.
- There's the true story, dramatized in the movie Bottle Shock, of how a new American wine defeated well-known French wines in a taste test... in France. They call it the Judgment of Paris, and all the (French) judges were absolutely horrified at what they'd done.
Literature
- Averted in the Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven book, Lucifer's Hammer: a senator has a number of unknown brands of liquor in his study, including one from the Southern California-based Fedco department store chain, called "Old Fedcal". He points out that the liquor is actually Old Forrester, Fedco simply has them bottle it under their label.
- In Tricky Business, the gangsters running the casino boat initially had bottles of various expensive liquors, but once they ran empty, they were simply refilled with the cheapest brand thereof. Customers never knew the difference. Many Real Life bars have gotten in trouble for this, by the way.
- John Stossel's nonfiction Myths, Lies & Downright Stupidity addresses the fallacy of assuming brand name foods are better (the stuff that isn't "Grade A" is no less nutritious or palatable, but often simply doesn't look quite as nice). Interestingly, Stossel noted that people are far less squeamish about off-brand household products and toiletries even though tests showed that the brand names really were better in most every case.
Live-Action TV
- In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Cordelia Chase once said that, when she goes shopping, she always buys the priciest thing she can find. "Not because it's expensive, but because it costs more."
- The idea that "more expensive equals better" was the entire point behind Robin Leech's Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, what with its exposes on solid gold toilets and such.
- Demonstrated and lampooned in an episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, where they set up a fake "designer water" restaurant in an upscale neighborhood. Whatever the clients ordered, they ended up getting municipal tap water from a garden hose in the back. Even so, they tasted differences between the "flavors", implying that the placebo effect is involved.
- An episode of Bones features the owner of a cheap winery getting back at the expensive winery next door by putting cheap wine in knockoff bottles. Almost no one noticed.
- The 2004 John Cleese documentary Wine for the Confused includes a blind tasting party, where about twenty of Cleese's friends sampled wines ranging from $10 a bottle into the hundreds. The guests' opinions were spread all across the spectrum, with no clear overall preference for cheap or expensive, imported or domestic. Cleese's message from all this: drink what you like, and don't let anybody tell you otherwise.
- Used in Scrubs where Turk buys an off-brand pregnancy test that takes longer than the name brand. This leads to a whole story where Turk knows about his wife's pregnancy before she does.
- Played with in a MythBusters episode, where a myth about filtering vodka was tested. In a double-blind test, an expert was able to taste which was the expensive vodka, which was filtered rotgut (and even how many times it was filtered), and which was unfiltered rotgut. (A test of chemical composition found that both the filtered and unfiltered rotgut had virtually the same composition as each other, while the top-shelf vodka had a distinct composition to the others.) Jamie, apparently something of a vodka connoisseur, also did reasonably well, rating the top-shelf brand over all others and getting the order close to correct. Kari, on the other hand, actually rated the unfiltered rotgut over the top-shelf brand.
Kari: I guess I'm a cheap date!
- On Monk, Monk will only drink Sierra Springs water. This is due to being Obsessively Organized. Until season 6 when he suddenly changes to the fictitious Summit Creek water. In Mr. Monk is Cleaned Out, he goes to Fiji water.
- Garth Marenghi's Darkplace includes a parody, in which the hero delivers a lecture on the important of using name-brand batteries. This is either the result of in-universe Product Placement or in-universe Writer on Board.
- A recurring gag on Malcolm in the Middle is that, when Lois is trying to get one of the boys on her side, she does so by letting him have a name-brand soda.
Music
- Eminem's Relapse has been noted by critics as containing an entire pharmacopeia of branded drugs, many of which will have listeners running to Google. This was because Em, a word geek, fell in love with the different brand names for medication during his stay in rehab, liking how they used unusual and catchy combinations of vowel sounds that made them fun to rhyme things with. It also helps emphasise the fact that, in the story, Slim isn't addicted to the scary illegal drugs that normally show up in rap music (although there's a couple of mentions of weed and ecstasy), but to the apparently mundane drugs prescribed by doctors.
- Eminem got so geeky about drug brand names that he even used regional brand names in freestyles recorded in those countries - one of his Tim Westwood freestyles during this period contains a reference to the British ibuprofen/codeine drug Nurofen Plus, once a favourite of abusers due to the drug being made in such a way that the codeine was contained only in one half of the tablet - some extremely obscure drug lore for an American to know.
Newspapers and Magazines
- In a taste test conducted by the people behind Cooks Illustrated magazine, cheaper bottled waters and tap water actually scored higher marks for taste than the more expensive brands, and Evian, typically known as a "high end" water brand, scored dead last in how it tasted.
Radio
- In the United Kingdom, Global Radio tried this with Heart and Capital replacing heritage brands such as Trent FM, Fox FM, Hereward FM, and then rivals such as Celador followed with The Breeze, and Orion Media replacing Beacon Radio, BRMB, Mercia and Wyvern with the generic-sounding Free Radio, and rumours abound that Bauer Media will do the same. However, the public seem to prefer heritage brands, and despite what some critics say in the business pages and in blogs, it hasn't worked, even for Heart, the British Trope Codifier for this in radio. Proof that this is very much an Inverted Trope.
Video Games
- In Fallout 4 and Fallout 76, name brand junk has more/better components, so you'll get more springs and gears from a Carlisle typewriter than a generic one, more nuclear material and circuitry from Wakemaster alarm clocks than regular ones, etc...
Western Animation
- In an episode from the first season of Kim Possible, it's revealed that Smarty Mart (Ron's favorite store) and Club Banana (Kim's favorite store) are owned by the same company—in that same episode, it also turns out that (at least when it comes to clothing) pretty much all the stuff sold at Club Banana can also be bought at Smarty Mart for way cheaper prices. In fact, as Ron notes, pretty much the only real differences between the clothing sold at Club Banana and Smarty Mart is the logos and the prices (and, as it turns out at the end of the episode, what they call the colors for at least some of their productsnote ). Another way that Club Banana differs from Smarty Mart is that Club Banana (which is still a fairly high-end store compared to Smarty Mart) sells actual designer labels.
- In the final season, Kim's mission outfit gets ruined. After finding that Club Banana no longer sells the style, she reluctantly looks for a "cheap knockoff" at Smarty Mart (but can't find it there either).
- Clerks: The Animated Series had Randal correct a bleeding customer asking for Band-Aids, demanding they be referred to as "Adhesive Strips". He's weaning people off of brand names. Yep, no spine of Jell-O here, my friend.
- In one episode of 101 Dalmatians: The Series, Dearly Farm runs out of its usual supply of Kanine Krunchies-brand dog food. Lucky, Cadpig, Rolly, and Spot are offended and horrified when they hear that they'll get AnyMutt brand kibble instead, arguing it must be worse because it doesn't have TV adverts. After foiling an attempted robbery on the local store, the pups and chicken are rewarded with dog food. Said dog food is AnyMutt, yet they didn't notice the difference. Or care since AnyMutt is apparently just as good, if not better.
- The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy has this interaction:
- Little Girl: Want my soda, mister?
Grim: Oh... no, thank you.
Little Girl: No, really. You can have it.
Grim: Aw, that's the nicest... wait! It's not that nasty generic cola, is it?
Little Girl: No, it's name brand.
Grim: Aw, that's the nicest...