Writing that blog post the other day as a counter-point to Gary Kayye’s assertion that Apple should buy Sony led me to meditate on the power of branding.

Of course Apple is famously derided for having itself and all its products surrounded by a Reality Distortion Field; so much so that “Reality Distortion Field” has its own Wikipedia entry.

But the Reality Distortion Field is not unique to Apple, many brands have benefited from building and maintaining Reality Distortion Fields of their own.

Today’s Strange ReTale is going to take you back, back to when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Back then, the kings of the big screen jungle were CRT Rear Projection TVs. They were big. They were heavy. They were expensive, and if you were in commission sales they paid really, really well.

Let me just say now that in my time in retail commission sales I always sought to find the right middle ground: the one where the client’s needs and wants were best fulfilled, and where I was well compensated.

It was the right path, because people bought from me more than once, repeat and referral business was my livelihood, and it was a mindset that took me from retail into system design and now into distribution: take care of people and they’ll take care of you.

But I digress.

Back to the story: One day I was working, helping a guy a little older than me decide on a big screen CRT RPTV.

On this shopping expedition he had brought the “trusted adviser.” In this case, it was his dad, a crusty, almost stereotypical gruff old German guy.

As all salesmen know, you have to sell to the trusted adviser just as much as you do to the actual buyer.

Moving along, the final choice was between two sixty-inch CRT RPTVs, a Toshiba, and a Sony.

Yes, we all know Sony made great TVs back in the day, but so did other brands, like Toshiba and Panasonic.

In fact, and I say this as an ex-Sony guy, in that era brands like Hitachi, Panasonic and Toshiba were as good as Sony, based on measurable standards of picture quality, and sometimes better.

But Sony was the Name You Know, and that was reflected in their margins: the spread between dealer cost and MSRP was typically lower than other brands.

In this particular deal, I had worked out an either/or price for the two TVs. Both had a fair discount off MSRP, in accordance with the total AV package he was buying.

The difference was that the Toshiba was priced $1000 less than the Sony, but paid me $800 more in commission.

Ah, those were the days.

You would think it would be a simple choice: Get the Toshiba and save yourself a thousand bucks.

But no, his dad, in his crusty old German guy accent declared: “Get the Sony, Sony is good brand, they are the best.”

Except that he pronounced “good” as “gϋd.”

There you have it, the Reality Distortion Field could persuade people to pay a thousand dollars more for a TV of equal quality to one that costs less.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (“the more it changes, the more it stays the same”)