How is Coca Cola rent seeking? How about Apple? I suspect you aren’t using that term correctly but maybe I’m missing something.
Both are propped up - actually maintained - by huge and vastly expensive brand management strategies.
The criticisms of individual campaigns here are missing the point. It's not about micro ad spend, but the perception of value and manipulation of behaviour created by the combined effect of multiple PR and advertising efforts - which include traditional print and TV/radio ad campaigns, guided advertorials disguised as news in the MSM, interviews with prominent figures, political campaigns of more or less obvious relevance to the core business activity, state, national, and international political lobbying, direct political campaign donations, advertorials masquerading as "freelance" journalism and blogging, managed astroturfing on social media, shareholder relationship management, product placements in movies and music promo videos, articles about commercial visual design elements in trade journals. And on and on.
That perception of value is - unsurprisingly - extremely valuable. And it's very much a US way of doing business. Instead of producing products that are inherently superior, produce something that is functional but glossily packaged, brand it as a premium lifestyle commodity, and charge exorbitant prices for it.,
The prices are traditionally far out of proportion to its actual utility. In fact real utility may well be negative - see also diabetes and any number of other health issues, depression associated with social media use, debt-driven spending on lifestyle products. Etc.
So the rent seeking comes from a kind of cultural squatting. There is value in dominating discourse in all of these different ways, because discourse and narrative define markets and ultimately control behaviour. And while this is happening other kinds of discourse - which may well have more real utility - are diminished at best and crowded out at worst.
So in this case it doesn't matter if Uber "wasted" their money. Uber have their own branding thing going, and explicit ad spend is a tiny part of that.
And even if all online ad spending ended tomorrow, a small number of corporations would have a difficult time for a while, but the marketing industry as a whole would inevitably interpret the change as minor damage and route around it.
In the case of Coca Cola, I agree - in the case of Apple, not at all. "Keyboardgate" aside, their products are vastly superior to the competition in build quality and life time. A typical Windows laptop is unusable after two, three years (almost all are made from plastic which breaks or looks extremely ugly rather sooner than later), and has next to no resale value while in contrast even old cheesegrater Mac Pro's fetch many hundreds of dollars today. iPhones are supplied with firmware updates far longer than most Android phones outside the flagship Pixel line are. OS X is, while it has gotten locked down a fair bit over the last years, still way better than Windows as it doesn't do tracking bullshit and start menu ads and decently better than Linux because no matter which device, stuff usually Just Works (tm) without having to fiddle for hours to get something as basic as a Bluetooth headset working.
Apple built themselves a loyal following with pure quality superiority over the competition, unlike HP or Dell who are only surviving because of enterprises who follow the "no one got fired for buying IBM" line.
And that doesn't even touch that it's Apple who's at the forefront of innovation. iPods, iPhones, iPads, Apple Watch, AirPods, now the M1 CPU - these entire device classes were created by Apple. When was the last time you heard about something truly innovative from the Windows/MS/Google side of IT? Only thing I can remember is the Google Glass.
What Apple is doing is not a "brand management strategy" per se - it is delivering actual value and innovation instead of rent-seeking. And for what it's worth Tesla are doing the same thing.
Marketing the new thing is what Apple does. It is good at it. That is not the entire spectrum of customer value.
Source: forced to use one daily. If I could get a Mac laptop running Linux but with the input smarts of the Apple trackpad and keyboard, I would in a heartbeat.
Source: Me.
The trackpad is superior to apples and it can come preloaded with linux
This shows that you are just spreading FUD. A Windows machine is no slower after 10 years than it is the day you bought it. Sure you might have added so much software-crap that the software runs slow (which is easily fixed) but the hardware is exactly as fast after 10 years as Apple hardware is. Do you think Apple builds their hardware out of magic and unicorns?
Capacitor, DRAM, Heat Sink, etc.... There are quality difference in hardware. Although the two / three years remarks were definitely exaggerated.
By "typical windows laptop" do you mean a cheap model where the macbook equivalent is buying nothing at all? Of course it's going to be lacking in that case.
Well-made windows laptops exist, and hold plenty of value. But you have to pay for that, no matter what brand you choose.
> tracking bullshit
Like checking signing certificates by pinging servers almost every time you run a program?
Apple's half of the phone Duopoly. Either you pay them or pay Google if you want a phone and want to buy software for it.
Calling it all "rent seeking" is not a hill I want to die one.
Exclusive / Special agreement with serving only one kind of Soda ( or no Pepsi where there is Coke ) are Anti-Competitive arrangement. Not Rent Seeking.
This page [0], for instance, says the cost of goods sold for the soda itself is a penny an ounce for the syrup and CO2. Iced tea is apparently the margin champion, as the same page indicates it can cost as little as a penny per glass.
[0] https://www.restaurantowner.com/public/Restaurant-Rules-of-T...