>I would read all of this intellectual property emphasis as an attempt to
>resolve problems of production at the level of the market. After all you
>can't get people to buy more shoes than they need (except by lowering
>the price, and hence changing their needs) but you can get them to buy
>your brand instead of someone else's. British household expenditure on
>clothes is remarkably stable for more than fifteen years (which explains
>a lot!). The elevated importance of marketing over productivity is a
>contemporary, and fleeting expression of a failure to do anything
>dramatic in production.
Sounds like you're saying that a lot of the IP hoopla is a fresh take on branding - a rebranding of the branding concept? - which has a pretty long pedigree in marketing. Seems a bit of a stretch to make it into a new economic paradigm.
Doug