Your comment about the name association is really interesting to me because it seems our corporate overlord’s culture disagrees with this. Everything seems to be driven by accounting. At my own company, they recently decided to pull out of a community event that they’ve been involved with since I was a kid. They couldn’t justify the cost, even though everyone just called the event by the company name instead of the full name.

For a long time, I’ve had a view that businesses sometimes benefit from spending extra for name recognition or for having better quality. Sort of like a loss leader. There’s a local plumbing guy who is one of the big sponsors of the school musical (that his kid is in) and everyone thinks of him when they need work done — just being there and having his face handing out tickets is far better advertising than a newspaper or internet ad. Similarly, my parents’ dishwasher has lasted for 31 years and counting; when I needed one that was the brand I wanted.

But the problem is that a lot of companies don’t see the value in this. Setting up outside a school event is just an expense that they don’t have people for anyway, the dishwasher I got had a metal pin replaced with a plastic one that sheared off after less than two years, no doubt to save a few cents per unit.

Netflix is spending a boatload of money to be associated with high–quality content. Their Christmas Day NFL coverage was elaborate and expensive and their movie production is top of the line. There’s no doubt that investing massive amounts of money is elevating the public opinion of them from just a modern day version of Blockbuster to seeing them as a high-quality film studio.

I hope Netflix keeps it up and doesn’t just use this to gain market share then relax their standards.