Brands are brands and that’s the way it is!

Sir, of course brands are useful when they motivate you to keep the name of the Financial Times in good standing, and me to do the same with my name. Having said that I feel you might have gone a bit overboard when in “Red Hot Brands” you defend so strongly the utilitarian value of brands, and I suspect it has to do with you feeling a bit uncomfortable with some of the questions those anti-capitalists that you refer to make, some of which are indeed quite difficult to answer. Forget it, there is no reason to be ashamed, brands are brands and just another fact-of-life that results from our human desire to identify and be identified. The next time some anti-capitalist nags you about brands just ask him about his Che.

And so, having hopefully cleared the ideological hurdle, let us now discuss objectively one of the main consequences of brands, which is that they frequently create quasi-monopolies that among other allows for wider profit margins. For instance one of the (mostly ignored) reasons for the declining shares of labour income in gross domestic products is most probably the growing importance of brands, plus of course all other type of intellectual property rights. And, so what can we do about it? I haven’t the faintest. I guess you could speculate on some progressive tax on brands depending on their market penetration but most probably, when in so much doubt, the best we could do, is to do nothing at all, letting the market to take care of that, as it sometimes seems to be doing through the pirating of brands... offering generic Louis Vuittons.