> It’s a foreign concept for many of us who seek out the best product or deals for each purchase and will change brands in an instant if another company releases a better product.
For those of us who grew up in the era of the "Are you a Mac or a PC" [1], many Americans are intimately familiar with the concept of brand identity.
Mac, yes. But I feel like being a "PC user" was never a coherent social identity. People use PCs for various reasons, usually pragmatic.
(Reflecting on it, I don't think I ever knew anyone who was "loyal" to Microsoft, or, dare I say, even particularly liked them as a company. At least certainly not the way people like Apple.)
In that sense, I feel as though Apple is the exception that proves the rule. There are really (almost) no other brands in Americans' everyday lives that elicit such a strong brand identity.
> But I feel like being a "PC user" was never a coherent social identity.
But there were people who were vocally non-Mac, dismissing it as “great for students and graphic designers”, but not a computer for real work.
(That was me in the 90’s. Of course eventually I began working on a Mac professionally.)
There are certain cases where brand attachment is stronger, but overall brand attachment in the US is pretty weak.