Graham's central thesis, that brand is what's left when substantive differences disappear, is accurate for the watch industry but it's describing a degenerate case. Most brand work isn't about papering over commoditization. At its best it solves a different problem: the difference is real but not legible to the buyer. I spent over 20y doing brand work for companies where the product was genuinely better. Harder problem than you'd think. Technical superiority doesn't sell itself, especially when the buyer can't evaluate the difference before purchase. Brand in that context isn't a substitute for quality, it's the translation layer between quality and comprehension. When we worked on HSBC's positioning in emerging markets, nobody was pretending the banking products were interchangeable. They weren't. The challenge was making a real advantage visible and credible in markets where trust in institutions was historically low. The "branding is centrifugal, design is centripetal" line is the best thing in the essay and it's genuinely true for the luxury watch case. But it breaks down in categories where the design space is still wide open. Early software brands, health tech, financial products, anywhere the user can't directly compare outputs before committing. There the centrifugal force isn't vanity, it's disambiguation. Where Graham is absolutely right is on the moral hazard. The further brand drifts from something real, the more it starts depending on the worst parts of human psychology to do its job. The Patek bubble management story isn't an outlier, it's the logical endpoint of brand fully detached from product. Most brand people I know are genuinely trying to avoid that. The ones who aren't are usually the most financially successful in the short run, which is its own kind of lesson.