Product Focus or Brand Focus

I've been looking at buying a Ducati recently. I put a few tentative bids down on eBay and I bought a book that describes the development of the bike I've been looking at. I got really engrossed into how they created the bike, how everything they do is derived from two principles: handling and power. How they pretty much build the whole bike around the engine, and the heritage they have with L-twin engines.

And then a weird realisation happened. I realised that I was buying the brand more than I was buying the product. I was buying the story of the bike and the association with Ducati, more than the technical ability of the bike. I had shifted from my product focused philosophy to a brand focused one.

Up until now, I've rarely cared about a brand. I've always judged a product's merits based on it's ability alone - untethered to where it actually came from. And I still think this is the correct approach if you'd like to be rational.

But other people judge a product's merits, less on the actual product, but more on where that product came from. They have "Brand Focus". This isn't necessarily a bad thing - it's not a completely rational thing to do in my opinion - but there is definitely an intangible value about owning a specific brand: a bit like art has intangible value. You can't rationally derive the value from specifications: speed, braking ability, durability etc; rather you start deriving value from how the product makes you feel. And that, in my opinion, is a slippery slope.

Regardless of all that, however, is that Ducatis seem to really maintain their value well.

So, in the end, does it really matter where the value is derived, as long as it's stable and predictable?