
Headless Brands - jger15
https://otherinter.net/web3/headless-brands/
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_nalply
I would like to add to the introduction about what a brand is.

A brand is a tool for buying products.

Buyers often or at least sometimes don't have complete information about the
product they plan to buy. They can't examine products thoroughly before buying
because they don't have the time, expertise or opportunity, even if there's a
need.

Brands can help here.

Companies create a brand and customers trust a brand.

This can work because a brand is like a promise of specific characteristics
and quality. Think Coca Cola: everybody knows what to expect from a bottle
even without opening and tasting before buying. Companies tend to take care of
brands because they know if they misuse a brand, the brand can lose its value
of helping customers buying the product.

This said, however, there have been misuses of brands, or at least rent
seeking. Customers are sometimes slow in pricing in the change of value of a
brand. If a well-known brand for home appliance is newly being used for cheap
and low-quality crap, the brand will be destroyed, but not before many buyers
have been screwed over.

This means that brands are not a panacea for the problem of buyer's incomplete
information.

Edit: The words "buy" or "company" should perhaps be better replaced by
"decide for" or "group", because brands are not only helpful for buying
things, but also for general decision processes of people.

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ricc
So basically any identity that has been established by the members of a
community instead of a singular entity... Like subcultures and other
grassroots movements.

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notzuck
Good lord that was a hard read. It's so academic it's pointless.

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leowoo91
Isn't most popular open-source projects also fall into that category? And what
happens if someone files a trademark on bitcoin?

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_nalply
Agreed.

And for the second question: if that is possible, this would prevent the
"headless" entity to use the words and symbols signifying the brand. If the
majority of possible consumers of the brand disagrees that the owner of the
trademark really owns the brand, this would destroy or at least diminish the
value of the brand.

A brand is more than the words and symbols used to signify the brand and
therefore the brand itself can't be trademarked, only those words and symbols.
It's like the word "apple" is not itself an apple.

