Do you always prefer to wear branded clothes or can you just buy no-name products? There are a variety of brands, the most famous sports brands include Puma, Adidas and Nike. For fashion brands there are Gucci, Chanel, Dolce and Gabbana, which have the highest prestige and are in the high price segment. But there are other less known manufacturers, the so-called no-name producers. No-name producers are in strong competition with brand name manufacturers.

The biggest disadvantage of branded products is that they are very expensive, without offering necessarily a better quality. There are very big differences in the price between no-name and brand. For example, if you pay 20 € for no-name trousers, the cost for a pair of trousers made by a brand producer would be 5-10 times the price of the pair of no-name trousers. Often this disproportion leads to the following reasoning and consequence: “Whatever the reason, you walk up to the $50 designer label t-shirt, pull it off the rack and head towards the dressing room. The almost identical (but lacking the right label) $15 t-shirt from the previous store is forgotten along with your budget for today” (Faze). And in a few cases these two T-shirts are of the same quality, so that the purchase decision can only be explained through the label. On this point, one can state that branded products are far more expensive without necessarily offering a better quality.

But why are teenagers actually longing for branded products? The answer is quite simple. If you want to be in a group, you have to be the same or very similar as the group members, the so called peer pressure. Since the most popular groups always generate their group identity through their physical appearance, one wants also to wear similar things. An example would be that through  branded items one would belong to this specific group. For many, peer pressure towards a group identity is so great that they find no other way to integrate themselves. This applies even more to those teenage students that seek to achieve a feeling of normality and belonging to a group, as expressed in the following statement: “Brand names, when not used as a social crutch, can provide a foundation on which kids can build feelings of normalcy” (Your Teen Magazine). The risk coming from branded products under this aspect is that they suggest a fake normality and identity, which is an expensive and misleading perception.

At the same time the brand industry is facing threats through counterfeited products coming from East Asia to Europe.  “Counterfeit products are fakes or unauthorized replicas of the real product” (Wikipedia). The issue around counterfeited products is that they cause many risks that are not stemming from genuine branded products. Many plagiarisms are also dangerous because they may contain harmful substances. The producer of a counterfeited product is not under the pressure and expectation to use quality and harmless substances as he is anyways acting against the law by using a fake brand appearance. Another disadvantage of the plagiarism is that the items of clothings maybe sold in a very expensive manner and then distributed in a very poor quality, for example, the sole goes off the shoe or the seams of the pants loosen and then open. The imitation effects caused by faked brand products are potentially harmful to health. The producers of branded products and their consumers are less likely to suffer of low quality.

But there are also the good sides of the brand industry. Some branded products may have a very high quality and are therefore very dull. According to Jabu Thwala, a parent “Brand names are often quality clothes that last longer and can be passed on. There is also the option of selling them if they are still in a good condition or donating them to the needy” (News24). So if you buy a brand name trousers, they sometimes may be in better state than no-name products. However, still no one can assure that brand clothes are made with less harmful substances than counterfeits.

In conclusion, branded products, specifically clothes, are likely to have a negative impact on students because they create a false perception of normality and group identity while at the same time costing a lot of money without necessarily offering a better quality. This effect is even reinforced when counterfeited brand products are bought because they are often offering even lower quality and can contain harmful substances. Teenage students are even more likely impacted by these negative effects because they don’t have that much money at their disposal and seek strongly a group identity and normality for their own personality and perspective. All these disadvantages are not outweighed by the potential high quality features that some branded products may offer.