When you buy from a brand with a reputation to lose, you are not buying a guarantee to an exceptional product, you are buying a guarantee to a product that is not exceptionally bad.
When you buy an appliance from an unknown Chinese manufacturer, you can get a solid product, but if you're not careful, you end up with a cheap knock-off that will break in a month. They can get away with it because nobody ever hears of them, nobody knows not to buy from them.
When you buy an appliance from a well-known German manufacturer, you can get a white-labeled product from a Chinese supplier, but most likely it will still be a piece of solid engineering. Otherwise, any incident will be in the news for weeks, and exactly those customers who bought the brand for name-recognition now avoid it for the same reasons.
I suspect that this will change as wages in China rise to a level where build quality no longer dominates the manufacturing cost and some Chinese brands will probably emerge to be seen as high-value internationally.
Yeah sure i can agree with that. What I was saying is that there is not any reason for me to buy a product from a german brand unless they are really less expensive, giving me a better deal (more features / warranty).
The only problem with Chinese products is the availability and their IP stealing not really the quality.
When you buy an appliance from an unknown Chinese manufacturer, you can get a solid product, but if you're not careful, you end up with a cheap knock-off that will break in a month. They can get away with it because nobody ever hears of them, nobody knows not to buy from them.
When you buy an appliance from a well-known German manufacturer, you can get a white-labeled product from a Chinese supplier, but most likely it will still be a piece of solid engineering. Otherwise, any incident will be in the news for weeks, and exactly those customers who bought the brand for name-recognition now avoid it for the same reasons.
I suspect that this will change as wages in China rise to a level where build quality no longer dominates the manufacturing cost and some Chinese brands will probably emerge to be seen as high-value internationally.