I don't think brand identity is about getting people to care; it's about creating an association in their mind, so that when they need X, they'll think of Y, instead of conscientiously having to think about where to get it.

Google is a good example, since their brand identity is strongly linked with web search. When people want to find something out, opening google.com is often an immediate reaction; they don't wonder if they should use a different search engine, or even look it up somewhere else. It's immediate and unconscious.

>Nobody (outside our tech filter-bubble) cares what Amazon does or doesn't do beyond their shopping and book business.

So true.

Well, they stick around for years. When I found the mail order catalogs they were 3 years old.

Amazon.com runs on a lot of 20 year old code because they've never been able to upgrade it, because there's so much cruft. Amazon menusand all that create cruft.

There are bugs I fixed in 2006 that came back in 2009 and are still there-- the team that I was on when I fixed them no longer exists because the people got pulled off for nonsense "products" like menus etc that eventually got canned.

It's not just that they are trying things, the things they are trying take engineers out of their key talent pool-- which is pretty shallow to begin with because Amazon is a very anti-engineering company. (Really they hate engineers at the executive level.)

Most of the site at this point is cruft while engineers run around chasing nonsense that will never be in production more than a year.