Comment by michaelpinto

It's a bit more than a "useful product" — for example an engaging game like Farmville isn't "useful" but it does quite a bit of brand building within the product. In many ways you an give software a personality (example: gamification), and those little touches might not be useful in and of themselves. A good real world example would be that the old Macs booted up with an icon of the computer with a smiley face — that wasn't useful but it was a great brand building exercise. Contrasting with that Acer did the same thing with their monitors and their logo was so ugly it made the brand cheap.