Creating Experiences

I was talking with a friend of mine the other day, and she brought up an interesting idea.  She calls it “Give it back!”  The idea goes something like this:  Say you are a guy, and you just bought a Subaru Forrester.  You researched the car, decided it was the one that best met your needs, and now that you have it, you like it.  Then you hear that it in some circles, that car is known as the “LesbianMobile du jour”. 

How do you feel about that?   Does it change your experience of owning the car? Does it change the type of research you’ll do the next time you buy a car?

How often do we buy products or services because of the attributes it is given by others?  And who are these people who get to assign this type of meaning?  I think this is what my friend means when she calls the idea “Give it back”.  People don’t want to be labeled by what others think about the things they own. But how often are we doing exactly that?