What I got from the essay: "brand is the only way to beat competition when you can't significantly beat them on quality". It's basically the market suffering from success. You can buy a cheap quality watch today.

For some product types there is no better alternative, like ISPs. But I'd argue this is because of monopoly, which is different from brand. Most monopolies (like ISPs) usually have negative brands, and there's no alternative not because one can't create a better brand (that's easy), but because the upfront cost to become profitable is too high.