Can Wine Buy Happiness?
Meant to post this last week, but didn’t get to it. Felix Salmon wrote a great post on how wine is one of the few things in the world you can buy for happiness. I’m fascinated by stuff like this:
The more you spend on a wine, the more you like it. It really doesn’t matter what the wine is at all. But when you’re primed to taste a wine which you know a bit about, including the fact that you spent a significant amount of money on, then you’ll find things in that bottle which you love. You can call this Emperor’s New Clothes syndrome if you want, but I like to think that there’s something real going on. After all, what you see on the label, including what you see on the price tag, is important information which can tell you a lot about what you’re drinking. And the key to any kind of connoisseurship is informed appreciation of something beautiful.
This is the messy part of branding. All those factors play into how we feel about brands, products, and just about everything else.