Marketing stories

Karl gave me a really nice Moleskine notebook for my birthday. It is lovely and it has a great story about being used by Hemingway and other creative types. I always have notebooks hanging about for writing in so it is a perfect gift and the history behind it is pretty cool. But my curiosity began to be nagged when I read the information inside about how the books had stopped being produced and then a small Milanese printing company began to make them again. It said bits of them were handmade. Really? Was this notebook handmade in Italy? Nowhere on the book did it say where it was made. But it did have a website - moleskine.com. Now I've worked with a couple of Italian companies in the past and websites were not really something they were strong on. Also they usually were .it not .com. Was this really made by a small Milanese printing company?
I looked up the website and sure enough that small Milanese printing company has been purchased by a bigger company with a really boring name. Sure they are designed in Italy but now the handmade bit is in China.
The latest marketing thing is to tell stories about your products makes it more authentic, people buy into the story, etc etc. The problem is when you are just doing it as a marketing technique, it still rings hollow. If you go to this website you read how the handmade bit is done in China but how this is so appropriate because the Chinese invented paper. They know and we know the only reason they are being handmade in China is to keep costs down. Sure it is a book with a lovely history and they are trying hard to market it as that but when it is made by some big comglomerate with a boring name in China - it does take the shine off the lovely back story.
I do still really like the notebook and it is made well but it doesn't matter what marketing technique you use, if the background doesn't back it up, the warm fuzzies are not really generated. Though there is a little thought gathering momentum in the back of my mind. If this was handmade by a small Milanese printing firm - would I have been able to get one outside of Italy? If it wasn't handmade in China - would it have been unaffordable to me?