MBA effect...

I guess it had to happen one of these days. This quarter I am going through Marketing course and discussions about Branding, Segmenting and Positioning products. Then, just this past Saturday I attended a Seminar on Branding by Marketing guru Sasha Strauss. All this talk, has really brought into focus how companies market their products and charge a premium from their customers by positioning them a certain way. Now, the side effect of this is that when my wife says, I want to buy this product (xyz) since it is premium quality or more expensive, I am jumping up and down telling her that it is all marketing... :) I see through the company's game plan and while she also realizes that (having done her MBA too), she still wants to go for it. :) Case in point - we were evaluating washer/dryers the last few weeks and each time she would get fixated on the most expensive ones (Electrolux). I saw other brands like Kenmore and Kenmore Elite side by side with apparently no significant difference in feature set but a big difference in price. It is quite interesting how we associate quality with a higher price. In the end both products will do the same thing more or less but a lot of people will shell out lot more money for a "elite" or "premium" sounding/looking product. So, we did end up spending $2.5k for the pair whereas it would have cost us maybe $100 or less to fix our old one. :)