When you buy something expensive, you might be able to keep it from your friends...but a whole bunch of other people you don't know will find out about it pretty quick. Your name and coordinates are beamed across the planet, propagating from data warehouse to data warehouse with an alert indicating, "here be fresh meat!" So I bought a Jaguar, my very first new car. I didn't even tell my wife about it, just drove up one day. The expression on her face was worth the price of admission. I had to have a special set of features (the Brits hadn't thought about tall people), so I had to order it from the factory. In the 3 months it took to arrive, my name was put on many new lists. I started receiving a magazine called "Millionaire" that provided a glossy catalog and complete instructions to make sure the reader never becomes one. I started getting mailings every few weeks from Jaguar, including a fancy newsletter- brochure trying to evoke their days as an independent sports roadster firm -- rather than the high-end Taurus division that Ford has made them into. I also started getting lots of calls and letters from market research firms. My opinion on all sorts of things was now highly sought after. No longer was I getting little trinkets or sweepstakes entries for my time -- it's been nothing but cash on the barrel. I'm averaging $67 an hour for being in focus groups at research centers in shopping malls and filling out questionnaires in the privacy of my own home. The questions they ask, though, assume I'm a little soft- headed...and sometimes have little to do with the products they're working on. An interesting example came up last week, when I was up for a focus group on luxury cars. They wouldn't say, but I think it was for Cadillac. I had breezed through most of the qualifying questions, but at the end were a couple I wasn't sure how they wanted me to answer. "Are you willing to spend significantly more for a top brand name?" I gave up and told the truth: "not really." Stunned silence. "Do you put a lot of care and attention into buying your wardrobe?" I was perplexed: "well, I think so...buy my wife doesn't agree." The researcher was nonplussed. She asked these questions over again. And then she asked them a third time, to make sure I'd really understood them. And that was the end of the focus group. No questions about the cars or how to make them better. The guys back in product planning wanted to improve their car's image without improving the car. So if I weren't concerned enough with image, my opinions weren't all that relevant. Maybe the guys who run the malls are smarter than I am. But maybe brands and image aren't more important than features, quality and value. Could it be that Sony didn't get its worldwide reputation from great ads? Maybe it had something to do with making the world's best value in televisions and TV cameras and tape recorders for 30 years straight and inventing the compact disk along the way. Even in luxury and fashion, companies don't get to charge more just because of their brand: they get their brand because their goods are worth charging that much more for. Chanel doesn't make people smell good because of its brand name -- it makes its name from making even French people smell good.