Name Brand Nonsense

They're everywhere: billboards, commercials, magazines, movies, schools, even your kitchen cupboards. They're name brands.

A name brand is a specific product that has licensed a name in order to build consumer awareness and generate sales. Name brands are copyrighted, allowing the manufacturer exclusive use of the name for advertising and promotion. Any recognition of the name brand, therefore, benefits the manufacturer by increasing profits. Companies spend billions of dollars each year advertising name brands and creating attractive packaging to compel consumers to purchase that specific brand.

What many consumers don't realize, however, is that over one-third of manufacturers also produce generic products for the same stores that sell their more expensive name brands. These generic products may cost from ten to fifty percent less than the more aggressively marketed name brands.

Generic Brands

Many consumers believe that generic, or store brand products are inferior to name brands. While the products may not be identical, a careful reading of the primary ingredients and nutrition information quickly reveals that there are usually no major differences between many name brands and their less glamorous counterparts. They may be produced by the same manufacturer, and while the actual production process may differ slightly to preserve the trade secrets of the name brand, such differences are minimal.

Generic brands are less expensive than name brands for several reasons. First, they are packaged in less expensive materials. Granted, one cardboard box or aluminum can is much the same as another, but generic brands use only basic colors and images on their labels, while name brands use more colors, elaborate graphics, and detailed fonts in order to attract consumers' attention. Name brand products are also placed in more prominent positions: at eye-level, on individual displays, or at the ends of aisles where they are more likely to be noticed. Many companies will pay for this type of preferential product placement.

Generic products are also less expensive because they are not advertised. No generic products figure prominently in commercials or appear in store flyers. Nor are they found frequently in movies or television shows. While some advertising, such as the brand of soft drink that your favorite sit-com character chooses, is more subtle than a multi-million dollar Super Bowl commercial, every time a consumer sees a product in a favorable position, they are more likely to purchase that name brand. The costs of such advertisements are passed along to those same consumers through higher prices.

Prices Differences: Name Brand Vs. Generic

How noticeable are price differences between name brand and generic products? In a comparison of common groceries including bread, instant coffee, canned vegetables, sugar, and milk, prices ranged from ten to fifty percent higher for name brand products of equivalent size. To a family of four, this could mean up to an extra thousand dollars each year for groceries to help support product placement and advertising.

Choosing to purchase generic products is not a matter to be taken lightly, however. Many consumers can taste a definite difference between a generic product and its name brand cousin, so the first step toward choosing generic products is to taste test each one. Start small, with a product that isn't normally consumed by itself, such as sugar or ketchup. Because these items are only one ingredient of a meal, any taste differences will be less noticeable and perhaps even indistinguishable.

A general rule of thumb is the more heavily processed a product is, the more likely there is to be a difference between the generic and name brand varieties. Soft drinks, for example, are highly processed and do not require any manipulation before being consumed. A consumer is therefore more likely to taste a difference between the products. Such differences are not necessarily bad, however, because many consumers find that after overcoming their hesitation about generic products, they actually prefer the taste of many of them over more expensive name brands.

By experimenting with generic brands instead of the heavily advertised and elaborately packaged name brands, you could easily save hundreds of dollars on your grocery bill. Those extra dollars in your pocket are the best packaging of all.

~ Melissa Mayntz