Something I've been thinking about lately is how easily people can be convinced to trust or admire a brand. I suspect that it's something that all humans do.

I've recently been having a great discussion here about how good or bad advertising and marketing is. The more I think about it, the more it seems like it might be a giant societal problem that we're so used to we don't even notice it anymore. That companies have over the years of trial and error figured out the biases and errors humans naturally have and can exploit them to make us loyal to something as meaningless as a corporation, even at the expense of friends and family in extreme cases like this.

We just didn't evolve to be able to deal with this kind of thing, and certainly don't have any mental defenses to a constant bombardment of people telling us that which company we choose to buy things from defines what kind of person we are. The idea of a "brand" and "brand loyalty" is like a virus that's evolved to hijack our sense of identity, and then gets us to pay ad execs so it can spread to more people.