On some level, all stories of successful brands resemble one another: the competitors in some category of good or service seem interchangeable until one of them, often a newcomer, dreams up some way of standing out from the crowd. O.K., maybe it’s not always that simple, but differentiating one choice partly by way of advertising, packaging and other image-enhancing strategies has long been a way of persuading shoppers to reconsider what they had previously seen as a mere commodity. Even, it turns out, bullet shoppers.
via nytimes.com
More insight from Rob Walker.