Ridiculous post.

One man's freedom fighter is another man's convicted mass-murdering terrorist.

What you're essentially saying with Mandela and the Midlands' brands listed is marketing/brand image/PR/Edward Bernays-style brainwashing can surmount any factual reality - as long as it is hidden form the final consumer of said product/pseudo deity.

Witness the 'struggle' over Syria, currently. The mass media push the line of an Arab Spring-style general revolt and uprising of the vast majority of the population against a genocidal dictatorship. Other, non-main stream commentators point out the whole 'Arab Spring' and the regime changes in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, ongoing-Syria, Yemen, the Horn of Africa, and finally Iran, are all backed and instigated by outside forces and employ mercenaries, not indigenous freedom fighters, who in other parts of the world are labelled as Western democracy-threatening 'Al Qaeda'.

It's all BS, Sir, and many, many are wise to the ways of the propagandists. Which brings us back to the Midlands brands 'Hall of Fame', of your list. Take Land Rover. A vehicle maker that almost since its inception was, and still is, notorious within the car industry for its chronic inability to build a quality, reliable product. Jaguar shared a similar reputation in its BL and post privatisation days, and was only saved from ignominy by Ford's deep pockets and near 20 years of diligent work by Ford's best production engineers to turn around an otherwise atrocious manufacturing outfit - likened by Ford execs in 1989 to the worst car plant(Browns Lane) they had seen, outside of communist Russia.

The point about Land Rover is, even though the quality problems remain pretty much constant, with Land Rover featuring last or near last in all industry standard surveys, like J D Powers' Initial Quality Survey, the buying public are bombarded with messages of an 'uber quality product', a 'world-beating product', a 'non plus ultra product', which is patently untrue, at least in straight product quality and reliabilty terms, as measured by warranty claims, days off road, etc., and isn't even true when measured objectively by way of performance metrics, or efficiency metrics, or even good old-fashioned value for money, which seems to have disappeared totally from the branding 'buzzwords' of the marketeers, funnily enough. But then when you're trying to flog a £20k-worth Land Rover Freelander, which itself is largely based on an outdated Ford Mondeo platform, for £40k, by calling it a Range Rover (the Evoque), and 'a genius stellar product', which again, patently it isn't, you better employ all your financial and other resources on marketing, to shift said 'mutton dressed up as lamb' product to gullible eejits, with a surfeit of disposable income.

Thing is, like 'Saint' Mandela, and like the 'plucky' Syrian Free Army's 'freedom fighters', this marketing/propaganda only lasts so long, until even the most dim-witted see the emperor has no clothes. In the end real values will always win out, like real quality, real value for money, real brand credibility, not some shyster/huckster type outfit, in the case of expensive consumer products, like high-end cars. Which is why Sir John Egan's 'Potemkin'-like edifice of a hugely successful privatised Jaguar crashed under the reality of dire manufacturing reality and needed Ford to pick up the pieces; why Land Rover is going balls-out to flog the bejesus out of the Evoque before the inevitable warranty claims roll in and two/three years down the line it gains a reputation for being overpriced, unreliable and outdated, just like the original Range Rover Vogue did under British Aerospace's cynical ownership period and its marketing-led push to the yuppie buyers of the day in the late 1980s, where once again a new owner had to pick up the pieces of an engineering hollowed out, marketing led company, as BMW did with the eventual, well-regarded third generation Range Rover. Question is, who'll be around in 2013/2014 to pick up the pieces of a similarly, patently marketing-led JLR of today?