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  3. It’s a truism of business-book thinking that a company’s brand is its "most important asset," more valuable than technology or p

It’s a truism of business-book thinking that a company’s brand is its "most important asset," more valuable than technology or p

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问题     It’s a truism of business-book thinking that a company’s brand is its "most important asset," more valuable than technology or patents or manufacturing prowess. But brands have never been more fragile.
    The reason is simple: consumers are supremely well informed and far more likely to investigate the real value of products than to rely on logos. "Absolute Value," a new book by Itamar Simonson, a marketing professor at Stanford, and Emanuel Rosen, a former software executive, shows that, historically, the rise of brands was a response to an information-poor environment.【B1】___________It was hard to figure out if a new product from an unfamiliar company was reliable or not, so brand loyalty was a way of reducing risk.
    Today, consumers can read reams of research about whatever they want to buy. This started back with Consumer Reports, which did objective studies of products, and with J. D. Power’s quality rankings, which revealed what ordinary customers thought of the cars they’d bought.【B2】______
    A recent PricewaterhouseCoopers study found that eighty per cent of consumers look at online re-views before making major purchases, and a host of studies have logged the strong influence those re-views have on the decisions people make. The rise of social media has accelerated the trend to an astonishing degree: a dud product can become a laughingstock in a matter of hours.【B3】________________
    For established brands, this is a nightmare. You can never coast on past performance—the percent-age of brand-loyal car buyers has plummeted in the past twenty years—and the price premium that a recognized brand can charge has shrunk. If you’re making a better product, you can still charge more, but, if your product is much like that of your competitors, your price needs to be similar, too. That’s the clearest indication that the economic value of brands—traditionally assessed by the premium a company could charge—is waning.【B4】____________But even here the information deluge is transformative; luxury travel, for instance, has been profoundly affected by sites like TripAdvisor.
    For consumers this is ideal: they’re making better choices, and heightened competition has raised quality and held down prices. And they’re not the only beneficiaries; upstarts now find it easier to compete with the big boys. If you build a better mousetrap, people will soon know about it. For much of the twentieth century, consumer markets were stable.【B5】______________
    [A]   However, most consumers figure out how to find what they are looking for without spending huge amounts of time online and this has made customer loyalty pretty much a thing of the past.
    [B]   Today, they are tumultuous, and you’re only as good as your last product. For brands like Lululemon, there’s only one consolation: make something really great and your past sins will be forgotten.
    [C]   When consumers had to rely on advertisements and their past experience with a company, brands served as proxies for quality; if a car was made by G.M., or a ketchup by Heinz, you assumed that it was pretty good.
    [D]  In the old days, you might buy a Sony television set because you’d owned one before, or because you trusted the brand. Today, such considerations matter much less than reviews on Amazon and Engadget and CNET.
    [E]  But what’s really weakened the power of brands is the Internet, which has given ordinary consumers easy access to expert reviews, user reviews, and detailed product data, in an array of categories.
    [F]  This isn’t true across the board: brands retain value where the brand association is integral to the experience of a product (Coca-Cola, say), or where they confer status, as with luxury goods.
    [G]  In a world where consumers are oftentimes overwhelmed with information, the role a brand plays in people’s lives has become all the more important.
【B2】
选项
答案E
解析 空格前指出消费者现在要了解想购买的产品的信息，可以阅读海量的产品研究报告。这与上一段所说的信息匮乏相对，因此空格处的内容可能与品牌忠诚度被削弱有关。E指出真正削弱品牌影响力的因素是互联网，而不是空格前提到的海量研究报告这个因素，因此，E与空格前的内容形成转折关系，用But过渡，自然连贯。空格后下一段主要讲述产品的网络评论对消费者购买意向的影响，正说明了E提出的“互联网削弱品牌影响力”的观点。E与上下文衔接紧密，故为答案。
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