About spending---who buys the expensive stuff?

My father is really cheap in terms of spending on general stuff. He used to buy a whole bunch of cheap pencils thought that he took some advantages, but turned out the pencils don't write at all. Almost anything he buys will break in no more than a month because he always buy the cheapest.

"The expensive clothes and shoes and gadgets are all manufactured in the same factor with the cheap ones, it's all a difference of the distribution channel." this is his wisdom.

But seriously, there are a lot of brand stuff that are just slightly better, either it's established in the business, having better customer services, better design or took monopoly in that technology, but the price could be ten times more than a non-brand product.
I most time just go with the non-brand ones and just satisfy the basic needs, like headphones, I'd rather get a 15 Euro one than a one hundred Euro one, since I'm not living on listening to stuff.

So, question is, who buys those over priced brand product?

The average income of Italian citizens is about 25k US dollar a year, breaks down to a 2k a month, which means taking 1k monthly necessities they still have plenty to spend, you can buy an expensive computer every one or two month if you tight your belt a little bit. And that is just "average".
Think about there's a smaller group of people we call middle class, who earns some more than 2k a month, maybe 3-5k, and this group of people are those really buy all the brand products.
Economy is like many circles intersecting each other. Living on 1k Euro monthly, my father of course can't stand spending money on any big brand, he thinks they are stealing from people. But there are people who can make way more and they are more entitled to consume higher class stuff. And that's enough for the economy to run, enough for the big companies to grow even bigger.