By Jane Sonnenschein · January 19, 2026

Peter Drucker once said:“The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.” 

I once worked for a company specialising in underwear, where I was mainly responsible for its Amazon sales channel. As a result, men’s underwear was a product category I knew extremely well.

I had worked with its costs, supply chains, typical price ranges, bestselling styles, and many of the products that regularly appeared near the top of Amazon’s rankings. Precisely because I knew the category so well, there was one question I could not understand for a long time: how could a brand like Snocks—neither particularly old nor widely known in the traditional sense—charge so much for men’s underwear and still perform so well on Amazon?

At the time, I saw men’s underwear as a highly standardised product category. There were, of course, differences in fabric, cut, and workmanship, but they rarely seemed large enough to justify a price that was twice as high as that of a comparable product.

When an established brand such as Hugo Boss charged a premium, the logic was easier to understand. Consumers were paying not only for the product, but also for the brand’s history, visibility, and symbolic status.

Snocks, however, was a relatively young German brand. Its products did not appear to contain any revolutionary technology, nor did they possess an immediately obvious feature that made them fundamentally different from other underwear.

And yet the reality was undeniable: the products were expensive, and many consumers were still willing to buy them.

Only later did I begin to realise why the question had puzzled me for so long. I had been trying to explain a success built on marketing logic through product logic alone.

I kept comparing fabric, workmanship, and manufacturing costs, hoping to find something within the physical product that could justify the price. What I had failed to ask was a more important question:

Why were consumers willing to pay that price?

My perspective changed when I later took a more systematic course in social media and brand marketing. Interestingly, Snocks was one of the central case studies discussed by the instructor.

That was when I realised I had been asking the wrong question.

I had kept asking:

“Why is this product worth so much?”

What the brand was answering was:

“Why are consumers willing to give us their money?”

The two questions may sound similar, but in today’s commercial environment, they are no longer the same.

When we look at Snocks purely from the perspective of the product, it is easy to become absorbed in comparisons of fabric, specifications, and manufacturing details. From a branding perspective, however, one of the company’s greatest achievements was the creation of a clear and consistent narrative.

The story included German university students building a company, beginning in a student apartment, adopting a direct-to-consumer business model, and using social media to tell people who they were, what they were doing, and how the brand was growing.

Rather than repeatedly claiming that their underwear contained a few percentage points more cotton than someone else’s, they allowed consumers to see something more personal: who they were, why they had started, what they were experiencing, and why someone might want to support them.

For many German consumers, this kind of story can create a natural sense of closeness. The company does not appear to be a distant and faceless corporation. It feels like a brand created by people from the same society, a young business that grew out of the German environment, and a group of real individuals trying seriously to build something real.

When founders and team members appear consistently on social media, sharing their work, difficulties, products, and everyday experiences in a manner that resembles communication between people rather than communication between a corporation and a market, the consumer’s understanding of the brand gradually moves beyond packaging and advertising.

Over time, the product is no longer merely a product. It becomes a carrier of the relationship that has developed between the brand and its customers.

This points to something often overlooked in highly standardised markets. When the products offered by different brands have become broadly similar, consumers are no longer purchasing function alone.

They are also purchasing familiarity, trust, shared values, and the psychological reassurance of knowing who stands behind the product.

People may not have an urgent need for one particular pair of underwear. Yet they may still prefer to give their money to a company they already recognise, understand, and feel able to trust.

In an age of economic uncertainty and overwhelming consumer choice, price still matters. Product specifications still matter. But both are becoming less capable of creating a lasting difference.

Fabric can be imitated. A cut can be studied and reproduced. Functions can be copied, and even supply chains may be remarkably similar. Trust, by contrast, develops through repeated contact over time and cannot be reproduced quickly.

In the past, when people spoke of a company’s “moat,” they usually meant technology, patents, distribution channels, or scale. In a world shaped increasingly by social media, however, another kind of moat is becoming more important: a long-term, authentic, and repeatedly verifiable relationship between a brand and its consumers.

Such a relationship does not mean inventing a moving story, nor can it be created through a single marketing campaign. It is closer to a sustained way of being present.

A brand continues to tell the story of what is genuinely happening. Its founders and team allow consumers to see the people behind it. The values it expresses correspond to the decisions it actually makes.

When that connection lasts long enough, buying the product becomes more than the purchase of an object. It also becomes a confirmation of a relationship that has already been established.

In recent years, many business owners have developed a strong sense of uncertainty. Economic growth has slowed, consumers have become more cautious, and market competition has intensified. Every difficulty appears to point towards the same answer: lower the price.

This logic has become especially powerful in the Chinese market. When a product does not sell, the price is lowered again. When a competitor appears, the price is pushed down further.

The result is a repeated reduction in prices, ever-shrinking profit margins, and an environment in which companies genuinely trying to make better products may find it increasingly difficult to survive. Meanwhile, businesses relying on lower costs and poorer quality may gain a temporary advantage.

But is the real problem simply that consumers have less money?

Or have businesses chosen the wrong form of competition from the beginning?

When we look at brands that continue to survive—and sometimes even thrive—in highly standardised markets, a common feature appears. They rarely devote all their energy to finding ways to become cheaper than everyone else.

They still need to control costs, improve their products, and ensure that their prices remain reasonable. But at the same time, they are answering a more fundamental question:

When product quality is similar, specifications differ only slightly, and price no longer determines everything, why should a consumer choose me rather than another brand that appears almost identical?

Perhaps this is one of the changes businesses are being forced to confront as marketing enters a new stage.

In the past, competitive advantage was often understood through costs, specifications, and functional comparisons. Today, consumers may also ask who a brand is, why it exists, and what kind of relationship it intends to build with the people who buy from it.

The product remains important. No brand can use an attractive story to conceal a poor product indefinitely. But the product increasingly resembles an entry ticket to the market.

What determines whether consumers remain is often trust, identification, shared values, and the psychological certainty that says: “I am willing to continue choosing you.”

As markets become more difficult, endless neijuan¹ through price competition may only lead everyone into an increasingly narrow dead end.

The way forward may not be another price reduction, but a change in thinking: instead of asking only whether the product is cheap enough, businesses may need to consider what they are actually selling, why they want consumers to choose them, and whether they can offer a reason to be trusted and remembered beyond the physical product itself.

Looking back at Snocks now, I no longer spend much time wondering whether one of its products is objectively “worth” the price.

A price is never composed solely of fabric, manufacturing, and production costs. What consumers are willing to pay for is not limited to the physical value of the object.

Many successful brands today are not merely selling products. They are also selling a relationship, a sense of identification, and an answer to the question: “Why am I willing to choose you?”

In an increasingly uncertain world, products are not scarce, and neither are the companies capable of manufacturing them.

What is genuinely scarce is human connection—and the kind of trust that develops over time and cannot easily be copied.

Perhaps that is where the true dividing line in the future of business will lie.

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Notes

1. Neijuan（内卷）: Literally translated as “involution,” neijuan is a widely used Chinese term describing a form of excessive and self-defeating competition. Individuals or businesses continually invest more effort, reduce prices, extend working hours, or consume additional resources simply to avoid falling behind, even though the competition creates little new value and may ultimately leave everyone worse off. In a commercial context, it often refers to destructive price wars and a race to the bottom from which no participant truly benefits.

This essay is also available in other languages:

Chinese version: 为什么同样是男士内裤，一个“名不经传”的品牌却能卖得这么贵？

German version: Warum kann eine relativ unbekannte Marke für dieselbe Art von Herrenunterwäsche so viel verlangen?