The X100v hype pushing prices to crazy leves

1. Jeff Biscuits wrote:

Foskito wrote:

instead of flooding the market they decided to make them ultra desirable by limiting production, and not selling them online. That is why scalpers keep selling them almost at 4 times the retail value.

Building brand value goes way beyond spartan concepts like simple “supply and demand”.

Indeed, and techniques like this are well documented. But they’re largely the preserve of markets such as the upmarket fashion and jewellery industries where value is almost entirely derived from image and/or exclusivity: goods where there is no intrinsic material benefit over competing goods (and often no notable technical merit at all compared to other goods) but people pay to get exclusivity.

We’re all irrational buyers, of course, so that’s not to say the same thing couldn’t start to appear in more “normal” markets like cameras—but it would be rather unusual, especially for a brand like Fuji. Leica can make a few nuggets from the Daniel Craig limited editions and so on, but even they don’t subject the whole product line to exclusivity.

Jeff, yes... we are all irrational buyers.

Brand value might be created by several reasons; by outstanding quality, by being use by role models aka famous people, by making it almost impossible to get, (even if it is not expensive etc.

What I can say is I know lots of people who own cameras, and have never been in a camera forum and people who collect watches who have never been on a watch forum either, so I am pretty sure many of those happy Tiktokers using their X100v as fashion accesories bought them because they look very cool and there is nothing wrong with that.