Right, good examples. But those are all physical products. Can you think of online brands that have that kind of power? I can think of some negative examples, like AOL, that most hackers wouldn't have been caught dead using.
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Indeed, thinking about it a minute, a lot of my experience with 'branding' online is that small and independent is cool. How much cooler is it to have a @yourowndomain.com email address than @hotmail.com? Remember geocities? Another thing that was sort of the lowest common denominator.
Maybe Google has a positive brand at this point, but I pay for very few things there. I suppose I might pay a little bit more to them for some things in the future to have everything 'tied together', but that's getting away from 'branding'.
Oops, you responded pretty quickly... I wasn't satisfied with my answer yet:-) In any case:
Branding definitely is not network effects, though. Branding is what your earlier examples are about, like Apple. Network effects can be present even if you're not really that excited about the company - like eBay or Paypal. Actually, in some cases, where there's some exclusivity in the brand, they may actually work in opposite directions. Network effects push you to 'go with the crowd', whereas, say, Apple says to 'think different' and get a computer that not everyone else has.
I think expedia is a good example in terms of advertising/marketing, where people use it because they get out there and sell it. So perhaps that's part of the answer to keeping a DHH style company out front - sell it lots and sell it well. That's not something 37signals has ever shied away from. However, something like expedia is also probably not likely to ever be completely commoditized/open sourced, so there's always going to be some scarcity there.
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Indeed, thinking about it a minute, a lot of my experience with 'branding' online is that small and independent is cool. How much cooler is it to have a @yourowndomain.com email address than @hotmail.com? Remember geocities? Another thing that was sort of the lowest common denominator.
Maybe Google has a positive brand at this point, but I pay for very few things there. I suppose I might pay a little bit more to them for some things in the future to have everything 'tied together', but that's getting away from 'branding'.