I have suddenly conceived the insane notion that brands are good for the environment. Can this possibly be true?It is now common to ask why property prices in Britain are so high. Another way of phrasing the question might be to ask why - at least from 1945 to 1990 - UK property prices were so insanely low.
To give you one anecdotal example, my grandfather was but a reasonably prosperous GP on the Welsh borders; yet in the 1950s he could easily have bought pretty much any house he wished within 30 miles. One of the houses he considered and rejected is now a 20 bedroom hotel with a handy quarter-mile of salmon fishing on the Usk. It was on sale for about six thousand pounds.
With his sensibly Scottish approach to such things, however, he bought a modest six-bedroom villa a few miles away, and wisely spent the savings on.....among other things.... a dishwasher.
Gee, thanks, Gramps!
Mind you, this was no ordinary dishwasher. For a start, it was only the third dishwasher sold in Wales (there's posh for you). It was manufactured in New Zealand. And it cost in real terms about the same as a Ford Ka does today*.
And that in part-explains why property prices were so low then - and so high today. Back then, domestic items were insanely expensive, and acquiring them soaked up most of people's discretionary expenditure. Air travel, domestic appliances, televisions, even telephone calls were near prohibitive to most people. Indeed in the late 1950s a ten-minute call to New York cost more in real terms than a transatlantic flight today.
Now, with these things cheap in relative terms, the money saved goes elsewhere. Not into more dishwashers but into property. Into services. Into convenience. And into brands.
Note that the new wealth rarely goes towards more cars, more dishwashers....not even to more flights.
This refutes the lazy assumption that increasing levels of wealth must inexorably lead to increasing levels of consumption.
By and large there is a limit to the number of TVs people want. I have heard of one man with two dishwashers, but he is a rare exception. There are very few five-car households. Mostly, as people enrich themselves, they do not buy more things but better versions of the same things - or best of all buy better branded verion of the same things. Most people, say, would rather buy three pairs of designer sunglasses than twenty cheap pairs.
Which leads me to ask this simple question: unless you wish to tackle environmental problems by impoverishing us all, can anyone think of a more environmentally friendly way to spend money than in the purchasing of brand value?
Brands are, after all, gloriously intangible. You can build a brand without killing trees and few precious raw materials are needed in their creation. The exploitation of child labour in making brands is rare. And yet brand value creates pleasure and confers status as surely as any more wasteful (ie tangible) value.
It may seem bizarre to say it, but brands actually succeed in making us happy with less. That is precisely why they make money for the people who own them.
Want to sell a car? You could kill a cow and give it leather seats. Or you could put the money behind making the cloth-seated car more desirable.
I might go futher. The value of any branded item often decays far more slowly than the value of unbranded equivalent. Those Chanel sunglasses you buy today will still fetch a fair price on eBay in 20 years time when third-hand, while their cheaper unbranded equivalents have been clogging up a landfill for a decade.
Yet, such is my instinctive lack of confidence in the environmental benefit of brands, I can't really comfortably believe my own argument here. It can't be true, can it?
Please, someone tell me why it's rubbish.
* It still works, incidentally.
