Come Again?

So someone asks the following question on LinkedIn: "Is branding more on the product or the emotional attachment between the customer and the product?" To me, the answer is obvious - the point behind branding is to tell people who made something, so that whatever marketplace reputation a person or company has built up can be attached to a novel offering. In other words, branding is how a party proclaims: "I/we made this." (Of course, there are exceptions.)

Clearly, I'm not a marketing person. Most of the answers that people have posted have been directed towards linking a customers emotion's to a product, one person even positing that "what matters isn't how consumers think of the product, but how the product makes them think of themselves." Okay, whatever. I thought that more people would focus on the more concrete aspects of products and branding, but the discussion seemed to quickly turn to marketing people justifying their salaries and being mainly self-congratulatory.

And then someone said (in part) the following: "We also use certain products in symbolic forms according to our beliefs. So marketing would have to play on the cultural affects of the product." Huh? What does that even mean? And I'm as confused by affect versus effect as anyone else, but I can't even begin to fathom how either word fits into that second sentence. I never thought that I'd see an example of Poe's Law applied to marketing.

But this is why I stay away from marketing conversations, unless I have a buzzword bingo card with me.