He is Coca-Cola's largest shareholder. He owns Dairy Queen. Last year, Buffett got a train set, buying into Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway. And in late April, he bought a piece of the world's largest candy store, sinking $6.5 billion into the Mars-Wrigley chocolate-and-bubble gum merger.

What's next for the Nebraska billionaire investor? DC Comics? Daisy BB guns?

It is true that Buffett, 77, frequently touts his childlike-love of cheeseburgers and Cokes.

In the eyes of many, the Oracle of Omaha -- whose Berkshire Hathaway holding company owns or has major stakes in many iconic brands, including Fruit of the Loom, Kraft Foods and Johnson & Johnson -- looks like a http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080608/BUSINESS/806080393 - brand investor .

Brand investors buy companies with well-known or well-regarded names. The belief is that even though a brand company may produce many unlike products, their http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080608/BUSINESS/806080393 - qualities -- supported by strong management and a broad marketing and distribution system -- will translate into consistent, above-average returns .

"Really, nothing can go wrong with the Wrigley and Mars brands," Buffett said on CNBC after announcing that he would finance part of Mars' buyout of Wrigley. "They have faced the test of time over decades and decades, and people use more and more of their products every day."

Brand-name companies can often charge more for their products than their less-established competitors and weather tough times more smoothly because of their loyal customer bases.

They also have the ability to leverage their name recognition to increase business .... In addition, brand companies tend to have dominance in their fields.

"Brands themselves are what one might call soft assets -- they don't actually show up in the balance sheet of a company's financial statements," said Robert Millen, chairman and portfolio manager of Jensen Investment Management, which has shares in Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and Johnson & Johnson. "But the value of that brand is clearly in the business -- and it takes years and years to build. Once you've built that strength and you continue to feed it and support it over time, then you get ... pricing power that allows the business to maintain margins throughout varying economic periods. Secondly, you get repeat business. And those two things lead to consistent earnings."

Branded-products companies have a higher propensity to pass along price increases when they have increasing costs themselves, said Larry Coats, of the Oak Value Fund in Durham, N.C.

"The consumer is buying more than just the raw material," said Coats, whose top holdings include 3M, American Express, Oracle and Berkshire Hathaway. "They're buying something else, whether it's a trusted relationship, or confidence in the product, an acknowledement of a higher quality."

To that end, one brand company that Coats, a value investor, has been buying in recent months is Tiffany, which consistently produces gross margins of 55 percent to 57 percent, above the 50 percent of typical jewelry retailers.

One of the key qualities Gary Bradshaw, of Hodges Capital Management in Dallas, seeks in brand companies is the ability to expand products overseas. The thinking is that though mature brands may have little room to grow domestically they could use their overseas plants and vast marketing power to tailor their products in a way that would help them gain market share in emerging economies.

But brand investing is not without its pitfalls. Even Buffett has had his share of stumbles despite his long-term record.

But in 1989, Berkshire Hathaway invested $358 million in US Air for 9.25 percent of the airline's preferred stock. In his 1996 letter to shareholders, Buffett wrote that he was "beguiled by the company's long history of profitable operations, and by the protection that ownership of a senior security seemingly offered me."

But, Buffett said, he overlooked a crucial fact: The airline industry was rapidly deregulating. This created cutthroat competition that ate into US Air's earnings even as it had to maintain a cost structure held over from a time when federal regulation protected the carrier's profit. Buffett unloaded his US Air shares at a gain in 1998, avoiding two bankruptcies by the airline in following years, but he characterized his analysis of the airline as "superficial and wrong."