Branding???

Hey again. two posts in as many days, I must be on fire. 
Branding, or even brand culture is a pretty major thing. Brand culture, for those of you less informed, is wereby a consumer mindlessly follows a brand based on a kind of undeniable arguement inside their head. So for someone to go out and choose a particular item over another based on no evidence other than there own arguement in their head.
It's thee kind of reasoning that apple or sony zealots have when purchasing their electronics.
"It's sony, so it's the best", or "it's an apple, It'll never go wrong"
So you end up with a subset of people, ignorant to all around them in their opinion of a particular item.

Now this may not seem like a major thing, you know some fly, others die.
It can't all be roses and butteflies, can it?

Well to be honest, if we continue in this way, we will end up destroying the market.
If we look back at the past, in particular the 70's. 1976 to be exact. A small company known as Apple inc was started. It was an alternative to the miocrosoft and IBm monsters at the time.
Now imagine that at that stage, the Apple 1(Apple's first computer), was a critical and commercial failure. Imagine if at no stage did Apple have that massive expansion, contraction and re-expansion that they had. Imagine what we woule be without.
The Ipod, the iPhone, possibly even digital music players. If you look back just 15 years, we could have stuck with removable media, with minidisc, or gone digital. But because of the way that we as conusmers had accepted the company, the iPod was a commercial success on a global scale.
But lets take it back a bit. If we take it back to the apple example. The Apple 1 did it all a bit dfifferently at the time. A mouse was used, with icons and all sorts. It was an option other than the giants of the time.
Let me give you an example from today. WebOs. An operating system that was not only different, but that had clear advantages over the competition. The difference between the two being that one gave us the basis for a global corporation and a true alternative to PC, whereas the other was cut short, deleted by a massive corporation unwilling to see their product out, due to a lack of commercail success.
What I'm trying to say is, as consumers, we're pigeonholed into focus groups and zealots and fanboys and all sorts. What if, in our blind following of brand ideology and the like, we're missing out on the next Apple 1?
Also every time a company dies, God kills a thousand kittens.
Peace out