A truism about prices and consumer products companies:
If a company can raise prices... it will.
Companies are always on the lookout for circumstances where they can raise prices. And they especially like circumstances where the consumer:
a) doesn't notice, or
b) doesn't have a choice.
Doesn't notice
When I say "the consumer doesn't notice" what do I mean? I'll explain with a hypothetical price-hiking tactic. Consider your basic Kraft brand salad dressing at $2.49 for a 16-ounce jar. Kraft decides to roll out a new, "upmarket" brand extension (for example, an "organic" or "natural" salad dressing) at a price point as much as 30-50% higher than the regular product. They market this product aggressively, paying for prominent shelf locations, signs, special displays, and so on, as Kraft attempts to position this salad dressing as a high end product.
Now, this creates a subtle "pricing umbrella"--for Kraft's regular brand, but for all other brands too. Even the store brand! Each of these brands now have room to raise their prices at least another 10-15%, to a point where they are still comfortably cheaper than the high-end brand.
Yet to a non-noticing, non-attentive consumer, all these products seeeeem less expensive, even though they're not. Voila! A price hike that consumers don't really even see. Because we notice relative differences much more easily than absolute differences, a new high-end or aspirational product can improve pricing dynamics for the entire product category. This is how pricing umbrellas work. And it goes without saying that consumers who "don't notice" don't even realize they're being fooled.
Doesn't have a choice
Let's move on to the second case: where consumers can't do anything about a price hike, even if they do notice. So, for the sake of argument, let's say (for some bizarre reason) you have undying brand loyalty to Kraft brand salad dressing. You simply refuse to buy anything else.
Well, you're pretty much screwed. And it's because of your "loyalty" to a brand that doesn't care about you, that doesn't even know you exist, and that sees you as a mere mark for future price hikes. You're stuck. You have to eat any increase in prices.
You can maybe hold off on buying until you see an attractive sale price (see last week's post for more on this), but you don't know when or to what extent the company actually will discount, if at all. At the end of the day, you're gonna eat a price hike. This is why brand loyalty is toxic to consumers.
Of course, I'm using salad dressing as an example in this post for reasons of rhetoric (and metaphor, as we'll soon see). After all, a flexible, empowered, open-minded reader who hears the words "Kraft salad dressing" and "price hike" in the same sentence will instantly begin reeling off solutions, substitutions and alternatives. To most readers here at Casual Kitchen the idea of buying salad dressing at all, much less a branded salad dressing (and much, much, much less an overpriced upmarket "aspirational" salad dressing) would be a ridiculous, even vaguely pathetic act. Especially in light of how easy it is to make inexpensive (and far more healthy) salad dressings at home.
Therefore, any reader here should easily be able to arrive at multiple solutions to subvert any price hike anywhere in this entire genre of products.
Okay. Salad dressing is easy. With other products it can be more difficult. Obviously. But the point is to try and think of any product, regardless of what it is, as if it were "salad dressing" in order to help your brain generate alternatives.
Really, it doesn't matter whether it's salad dressing, airline tickets, cars, houses or ...yachts. You want to make it so that all providers of all products have to compete--on multiple, multiple levels--in order to win your business.
And yeah, I know: one one level, salad dressing doesn't really matter. Nobody changes their standard of living by beating price hikes in the salad dressing aisle. But you will change your standard of living if you can employ these concepts in other life domains and with other, much bigger-ticket items.
If there are competing products in the same store, great. If not, make them them compete "temporally" by holding off on your buying until you see a truly attractive sale price. Invoke competition from other retailers, from online retailers, and so on.
Finally, when all else fails, make them compete with a truly out of the box solution. (Examples: make the product yourself at home, use the "don't want it" heuristic, find a truly original substitutive solution, etc.) Force these guys to compete for your business on multiple, multiple levels, and you will reclaim most of your power and resist any pricing games they play.
Remember: if you don't have options you are toast. You'll be beholden to some retailer or some company and all their sneaky, creepy pricing tactics.
******************
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Showing posts with label brand disloyalty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label brand disloyalty. Show all posts
"Women's Vitamins"
Readers, see the following embarrassingly amateurish photo, and tell me: what do you think might be the difference between these two types of vitamins?
Well, one is branded--by Bayer, one of the most trusted brands in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industry. The other isn't.
One is a "women's formula" and offers consumers "bone and breast health support." The other, with its more modest and plausible claims of being "gluten free" and offering "daily well being," doesn't make me laugh quite as hysterically.
Granted, the branded vitamin contains calcium and a few bonus obscure minerals, all of which you already get in sufficient amounts from a normal diet:
Let's face it: these two bottles of vitamin tablets are virtually identical. And given recent research on vitamins, neither will likely make any difference to your health.
The only distinction: one costs about three times as much per tablet.
Now, you might rationalize this price differential by arguing that the "untrustworthy" generic vitamin was probably manufactured in some horrible Chinese sweatshop by exploited, underpaid workers who secretly added extra lead and mercury to each pill. And of course the "trustworthy" brand was surely manufactured by people who care, who really care about you, and would never outsource manufacturing to anybody.
Feel free to think this if it makes you feel better. But the rest of the readers here at Casual Kitchen know that a brand signifies nothing about who makes, packages, or formulates the product inside. Nothing.
The only difference is the cost premium of the branded product, paid by you and received by them in the form of excess profit. And... the pill's bigger.
READ NEXT: How to Own the Consumer Products Industry--And I Mean Literally Own It
And: Consumer Empowerment: How To Self-Fund Your Consumer Products Purchases
Well, one is branded--by Bayer, one of the most trusted brands in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industry. The other isn't.
One is a "women's formula" and offers consumers "bone and breast health support." The other, with its more modest and plausible claims of being "gluten free" and offering "daily well being," doesn't make me laugh quite as hysterically.
Granted, the branded vitamin contains calcium and a few bonus obscure minerals, all of which you already get in sufficient amounts from a normal diet:
 |
| Branded |
 |
| Unbranded |
Let's face it: these two bottles of vitamin tablets are virtually identical. And given recent research on vitamins, neither will likely make any difference to your health.
The only distinction: one costs about three times as much per tablet.
Now, you might rationalize this price differential by arguing that the "untrustworthy" generic vitamin was probably manufactured in some horrible Chinese sweatshop by exploited, underpaid workers who secretly added extra lead and mercury to each pill. And of course the "trustworthy" brand was surely manufactured by people who care, who really care about you, and would never outsource manufacturing to anybody.
Feel free to think this if it makes you feel better. But the rest of the readers here at Casual Kitchen know that a brand signifies nothing about who makes, packages, or formulates the product inside. Nothing.
The only difference is the cost premium of the branded product, paid by you and received by them in the form of excess profit. And... the pill's bigger.
READ NEXT: How to Own the Consumer Products Industry--And I Mean Literally Own It
And: Consumer Empowerment: How To Self-Fund Your Consumer Products Purchases
I really like Tide. Why can't I use it?
Dear CK:
I read with interest some of your posts on branding, in particular the post on the tuna recall and your other posts about how there's no difference between branded and store-brand products. But some brands actually are better than the generic brand. With laundry detergent for example, I really like Tide. Why can't I use it?
This reader is absolutely correct: some brands are better. Some products are superior to others. And, by definition, you're going to like some brands and some products better than others, just based on your arbitrary personal preferences.
So go ahead and buy those brands! I have no intention of telling readers to buy products they don't like, nor would I tell readers not to buy products they do like. Buy what you want and what you like. That's what consumer empowerment is all about.
That said, I wrote my various articles on brands to give readers a framework to think about the central nature of branding. What it is, how it affects our perceptions of a product, and how we gradually perceive a brand as "better," thanks to certain cues and cognitive shortcuts companies use to impact our perceptions.
In all of my work on this topic, one point I'm consistently trying to make is this: often we unconsciously assume a brand is better--and pay a significant price premium for it too--when it may not be any better at all.
And in the (increasingly common) worst-case scenario, there may be zero difference between a branded product and the store-brand or generic product. Remember the takeaway from the Bumblebee Tuna controversy: identical commodity tuna is canned and sold under various labels by the same third-party food manufacturer. Which means the branding of this particular product amounts to nothing more than a paper label and a 30-50% higher price!
This is why it's worth it on occasion to blind test other brands against store- or generic brands. Often they're not just equivalent, but identical. The only difference is that you pay more for no reason.
Sure, you can pay up for Tide if you confidently believe you receive appropriate value for Tide's price premium over comparable products.* But don't trust blindly. Once in a while, verify.
In the modern era of third-party manufacturing and branding by perception manipulation, why would anybody automatically "trust" a brand?
Stay tuned! Next week, I've got a big surprise for readers interested in learning more about branding, advertising and the various psychological techniques of the consumer products industry.
* A final footnote: Interestingly, here at CK, we at one point had a view similar to this reader regarding Tide, yet we never tested this view by trying another brand. We simply liked Tide, and didn't really pay much attention to what it cost relative to other products. We just bought it without thinking. And as a result, we blindly and habitually paid substantially higher prices for Tide for many years before discovering, to our dismay, that we could not tell any difference whatsoever between it and other laundry products, some of which sold for less than half of Tide’s premium price. Consumer products companies love--love!--consumers like this.
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
I read with interest some of your posts on branding, in particular the post on the tuna recall and your other posts about how there's no difference between branded and store-brand products. But some brands actually are better than the generic brand. With laundry detergent for example, I really like Tide. Why can't I use it?
This reader is absolutely correct: some brands are better. Some products are superior to others. And, by definition, you're going to like some brands and some products better than others, just based on your arbitrary personal preferences.
So go ahead and buy those brands! I have no intention of telling readers to buy products they don't like, nor would I tell readers not to buy products they do like. Buy what you want and what you like. That's what consumer empowerment is all about.
That said, I wrote my various articles on brands to give readers a framework to think about the central nature of branding. What it is, how it affects our perceptions of a product, and how we gradually perceive a brand as "better," thanks to certain cues and cognitive shortcuts companies use to impact our perceptions.
In all of my work on this topic, one point I'm consistently trying to make is this: often we unconsciously assume a brand is better--and pay a significant price premium for it too--when it may not be any better at all.
And in the (increasingly common) worst-case scenario, there may be zero difference between a branded product and the store-brand or generic product. Remember the takeaway from the Bumblebee Tuna controversy: identical commodity tuna is canned and sold under various labels by the same third-party food manufacturer. Which means the branding of this particular product amounts to nothing more than a paper label and a 30-50% higher price!
This is why it's worth it on occasion to blind test other brands against store- or generic brands. Often they're not just equivalent, but identical. The only difference is that you pay more for no reason.
Sure, you can pay up for Tide if you confidently believe you receive appropriate value for Tide's price premium over comparable products.* But don't trust blindly. Once in a while, verify.
In the modern era of third-party manufacturing and branding by perception manipulation, why would anybody automatically "trust" a brand?
Stay tuned! Next week, I've got a big surprise for readers interested in learning more about branding, advertising and the various psychological techniques of the consumer products industry.
* A final footnote: Interestingly, here at CK, we at one point had a view similar to this reader regarding Tide, yet we never tested this view by trying another brand. We simply liked Tide, and didn't really pay much attention to what it cost relative to other products. We just bought it without thinking. And as a result, we blindly and habitually paid substantially higher prices for Tide for many years before discovering, to our dismay, that we could not tell any difference whatsoever between it and other laundry products, some of which sold for less than half of Tide’s premium price. Consumer products companies love--love!--consumers like this.
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
Pabst and MillerCoors (Accidentally) Reveal an Open Secret in the Consumer Products Industry
Readers, a rather embarrassing recent lawsuit between Pabst and MillerCoors just gave us yet another reason to deeply distrust brands and branding. I've copied the article's full text at the bottom of this post, but these are the relevant facts:
1) Pabst Brewing Company filed a breach of contract lawsuit against MillerCoors, accusing it of deliberately violating a long-term production agreement in an attempt to sabotage Pabst as a competitor.
2) Pabst claims it was told that MillerCoors no longer had the available capacity to extend the arrangement past 2020, and would only do so if Pabst paid three times the current rate.
3) MillerCoors first began brewing for Pabst in 1999, but MillerCoors has announced the planned closure of its Eden, NC facility where most of its Pabst production took place.
Now, at first this lawsuit might just look like a couple of gigantic beer companies whining at each other (uh, which it is). However, if you look at these facts through a lens of consumer empowerment, this lawsuit tells us something much bigger. It tells us about an increasingly open secret in the consumer products industry: that many if not most companies simply do not make--and no longer intend to make--the foods, beverages or products they sell.
In fact, this practice is so widespread that, incredibly, companies will even hire direct competitors to make product for them. Just like Pabst hired MillerCoors.
These companies don't want you know this. And to be honest, they can't afford to have you know it. Why? Because if anybody can make their product, their brands cannot possibly have any value.
Let's go further. Recently, you (accidentally) found out Bumblebee Tuna is produced by a third-party food manufacturer. This manufacturer also produces Chicken of the Sea brand tuna, and it also produces nearly identical store-brand canned tuna costing some 30-40% less. When you found all this out, did you value Bumblebee and Chicken of the Sea brands more? Or less?
When you found out about Sara Lee's decision to sell off all of its bakeries to become a "virtual foodmaker," contracting out the manufacture of all of its cakes and pastries, did it make you excited to pay up for Sara Lee labeled foods? Or, instead, once you learned that Sara Lee does little more than slap stickers on somebody else’s cakes, did it make you question the entire value of the brand?
The inadvertent disclosure that Pabst brews little if any of its own beer is yet another textbook example of how consumers can save a ton of money by being just a little more knowledgeable--and cynical--about how most branded products are made. Remember also the unfortunate revelation that Pabst is the same beer company that sells the same beer to three totally different market segments at drastically different prices.
Readers, if you knew that a brand you habitually buy is actually made by some unnamed third-party food manufacturer (or beer brewer), why would you pay extra for that brand? And if you knew that the same third-party food manufacturer was also making the less expensive but equivalent unbranded products sitting right next to your favorite brand, why in the world would you pay extra for that brand?
One final point. If you're running a consumer products company and you decide to enhance your profits by going "asset-lite" and hiring other companies to make your products for you, you're taking on two immense strategic risks. First, the company you contract out to can always change its mind--or drastically raise prices, just as MillerCoors did to Pabst. And if you don't have your own beer brewing assets and capacity, you're outta luck. Suddenly, you can't even make your own product.
But it gets worse. Brands that contract out most or all of their production are engaging in a second, and far more dangerous, strategic risk: the risk that they'll utterly destroy the perceived value of their brands in the eyes of consumers.
The strategy of taking a well-known product brand and outsourcing it to third-party manufacturers is, essentially, an arbitrage play. These companies capture the excess price you habitually pay for their brand, while they save on operating expenses and capital expenditures by using somebody else's factory assets rather than their own. While a shareholder in a consumer products company might love this idea, a savvy, empowered consumer will flatly refuse to pay up for a brand arbitraged at her expense. She'll obtain far more value choosing an equivalent and more appropriately-priced generic or store brand. Heck, they all likely come from the same factory anyway.
Brands were supposed to be an intangible representation of quality. Now, increasingly, they just represent a sticker and a pointlessly high price.
Once you learn what consumer products companies don't want you to know--once you see that the emperor has no clothes, and that anybody, anywhere (even a direct competitor!) might be manufacturing a given branded product, that brand loses all value. There's nothing special about it at all.
Read Next: Consumers! Pay For Your Own Brainwashing (Or Don't)
Notes:
1) A big hat-tip to Stuart at Addicted to Canning for pointing me to the news story about Pabst and MillerCoors.
2) The Pabst MillerCoors article, full text:
Pabst Sues MillerCoors Over Eden Plant Closure
Pabst Brewing Company last week filed a breach of contract lawsuit against MillerCoors, accusing the company of deliberately violating a long-term production agreement in an attempt to sabotage Pabst as a competitor.
According the official lawsuit, obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the two companies began negotiating a five year extension of MillerCoors’ production contract to brew Pabst beers past 2020 early last year. Although MillerCoors had initially assured Pabst that it had the production capacity to continue the arrangement, the company abruptly reversed its position and announced the planned closure of its Eden, N.C. facility — where most of its Pabst production took place.
Pabst claims it was told that MillerCoors no longer had the available capacity to extend the arrangement past 2020, and would only do so if Pabst paid three times the current rate — effectively killing any opportunity for negotiations to continue.
Pabst lawsuit accuses MillerCoors of “attempting to frustrate [its] contract rights,” and claims that losing the ability to extend the contract will cost the company upwards of $400 million in damages.
A spokesman for MillerCoors told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel the company had done nothing wrong and was “highly confident” that the court would rule in its favor.
In total, Pabst filed seven claims against MillerCoors, including breach of good faith and fair dealing, strict liability for misrepresentation, fraud and negligence.
MillerCoors first began brewing for Pabst in 1999. The two companies set terms for their current production agreement in 2007.
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
1) Pabst Brewing Company filed a breach of contract lawsuit against MillerCoors, accusing it of deliberately violating a long-term production agreement in an attempt to sabotage Pabst as a competitor.
2) Pabst claims it was told that MillerCoors no longer had the available capacity to extend the arrangement past 2020, and would only do so if Pabst paid three times the current rate.
3) MillerCoors first began brewing for Pabst in 1999, but MillerCoors has announced the planned closure of its Eden, NC facility where most of its Pabst production took place.
Now, at first this lawsuit might just look like a couple of gigantic beer companies whining at each other (uh, which it is). However, if you look at these facts through a lens of consumer empowerment, this lawsuit tells us something much bigger. It tells us about an increasingly open secret in the consumer products industry: that many if not most companies simply do not make--and no longer intend to make--the foods, beverages or products they sell.
In fact, this practice is so widespread that, incredibly, companies will even hire direct competitors to make product for them. Just like Pabst hired MillerCoors.
These companies don't want you know this. And to be honest, they can't afford to have you know it. Why? Because if anybody can make their product, their brands cannot possibly have any value.
Let's go further. Recently, you (accidentally) found out Bumblebee Tuna is produced by a third-party food manufacturer. This manufacturer also produces Chicken of the Sea brand tuna, and it also produces nearly identical store-brand canned tuna costing some 30-40% less. When you found all this out, did you value Bumblebee and Chicken of the Sea brands more? Or less?
When you found out about Sara Lee's decision to sell off all of its bakeries to become a "virtual foodmaker," contracting out the manufacture of all of its cakes and pastries, did it make you excited to pay up for Sara Lee labeled foods? Or, instead, once you learned that Sara Lee does little more than slap stickers on somebody else’s cakes, did it make you question the entire value of the brand?
The inadvertent disclosure that Pabst brews little if any of its own beer is yet another textbook example of how consumers can save a ton of money by being just a little more knowledgeable--and cynical--about how most branded products are made. Remember also the unfortunate revelation that Pabst is the same beer company that sells the same beer to three totally different market segments at drastically different prices.
Readers, if you knew that a brand you habitually buy is actually made by some unnamed third-party food manufacturer (or beer brewer), why would you pay extra for that brand? And if you knew that the same third-party food manufacturer was also making the less expensive but equivalent unbranded products sitting right next to your favorite brand, why in the world would you pay extra for that brand?
One final point. If you're running a consumer products company and you decide to enhance your profits by going "asset-lite" and hiring other companies to make your products for you, you're taking on two immense strategic risks. First, the company you contract out to can always change its mind--or drastically raise prices, just as MillerCoors did to Pabst. And if you don't have your own beer brewing assets and capacity, you're outta luck. Suddenly, you can't even make your own product.
But it gets worse. Brands that contract out most or all of their production are engaging in a second, and far more dangerous, strategic risk: the risk that they'll utterly destroy the perceived value of their brands in the eyes of consumers.
The strategy of taking a well-known product brand and outsourcing it to third-party manufacturers is, essentially, an arbitrage play. These companies capture the excess price you habitually pay for their brand, while they save on operating expenses and capital expenditures by using somebody else's factory assets rather than their own. While a shareholder in a consumer products company might love this idea, a savvy, empowered consumer will flatly refuse to pay up for a brand arbitraged at her expense. She'll obtain far more value choosing an equivalent and more appropriately-priced generic or store brand. Heck, they all likely come from the same factory anyway.
Once you learn what consumer products companies don't want you to know--once you see that the emperor has no clothes, and that anybody, anywhere (even a direct competitor!) might be manufacturing a given branded product, that brand loses all value. There's nothing special about it at all.
Read Next: Consumers! Pay For Your Own Brainwashing (Or Don't)
Notes:
1) A big hat-tip to Stuart at Addicted to Canning for pointing me to the news story about Pabst and MillerCoors.
2) The Pabst MillerCoors article, full text:
Pabst Sues MillerCoors Over Eden Plant Closure
Pabst Brewing Company last week filed a breach of contract lawsuit against MillerCoors, accusing the company of deliberately violating a long-term production agreement in an attempt to sabotage Pabst as a competitor.
According the official lawsuit, obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the two companies began negotiating a five year extension of MillerCoors’ production contract to brew Pabst beers past 2020 early last year. Although MillerCoors had initially assured Pabst that it had the production capacity to continue the arrangement, the company abruptly reversed its position and announced the planned closure of its Eden, N.C. facility — where most of its Pabst production took place.
Pabst claims it was told that MillerCoors no longer had the available capacity to extend the arrangement past 2020, and would only do so if Pabst paid three times the current rate — effectively killing any opportunity for negotiations to continue.
Pabst lawsuit accuses MillerCoors of “attempting to frustrate [its] contract rights,” and claims that losing the ability to extend the contract will cost the company upwards of $400 million in damages.
A spokesman for MillerCoors told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel the company had done nothing wrong and was “highly confident” that the court would rule in its favor.
In total, Pabst filed seven claims against MillerCoors, including breach of good faith and fair dealing, strict liability for misrepresentation, fraud and negligence.
MillerCoors first began brewing for Pabst in 1999. The two companies set terms for their current production agreement in 2007.
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
"The Piles of Cash Were Fake"
I’m guessing Casual Kitchen readers don’t keep all that current with controversies in the world of rap music. But a fascinating thing happened last month with the rapper 50 Cent (otherwise known as Curtis Jackson), and it ties eerily into our many discussions here at Casual Kitchen about branding, identity construction and consumerism.
The controversy centered around Jackson’s bankruptcy filing last year, and the unfortunate fact that he recently posted photographs of himself on social media sitting next to stacks of money.
Of course, when you declare bankruptcy you’re required to state honestly all of your assets and liabilities to the court. Thus the court quite reasonably thought the stacks of cash meant that 50 Cent lied about his financial position.
Which takes us to Fitty’s response: “Just because I am photographed in or next to a certain vehicle, wearing an article of clothing, holding a product, sitting next to what appears to be large sums of money or modeling expensive pieces of jewelry does not meant that I own everything in those photos.”
In other words, 50 Cent inadvertently caught himself in a branding Catch-22. If the money was real, he then shielded assets and lied to the court. If the money was fake, then his “brand” becomes fake to the point of self-parody.
As a quick thought experiment, imagine what else 50 Cent could have done with his stacks of “what appears to be large sums of money.” He could simply count his money, privately. He could take the photograph, but keep it to himself. Or, he could send the photo, quietly, to one or two friends.
Sounds ridiculous, right? Nobody takes a selfie next to a pile of money just to keep the photo to themselves.
Yet somehow putting that same photo on Instagram and broadcasting it to everyone becomes, weirdly, a legitimate act of branding. In fact, it’s hard to think of a more quintessential Veblen-esque * act than photographing yourself next to piles of money and sharing it on social media.
Except! When the money turns out to be fake, your personal brand looks awfully fake too. Equally as fake as, say, the brand on a can of Bumblebee Tuna, or a Sara Lee cake.
So what happens when a brand conflicts so overtly with reality? Well, for one thing, the owner of the brand will want to keep you from finding out the truth. Which is why 50 Cent has to hope his fans don't read too many articles about his problems with the bankruptcy court, and why Bumblebee Tuna has to hope that consumers reading about their recent tuna recall fail to notice all the facts--and fail to put two and two together.
However, those consumers who do find out the truth will no doubt feel cheated, ripped-off, and they'll quickly stop paying a price premium for your products. In fact, they’d be quite justified in no longer buying your products at all.
One last thought. It’s all too easy to criticize a celebrity for doing something like this. But we could ask ourselves similar questions about the things we do, buy and share. Social media was created to fulfill many of our status hierarchy and identity construction needs, and it does it so well that it's almost as if nothing counts any more unless there's some meta-representation of it online. These are self-branding events for us, and honestly, they’re often not all that different from what 50 Cent did.
Our acts of consumption and self-branding--and our sharing of them online--literally make life more difficult for everyone around us. How? By raising the status competition bar for others. Flashy purchases and flashy actions have a blast radius. Your friends, family, colleagues and neighbors exist in that blast radius. When we buy or do flashy things we don't just feed our own insatiable status competition urges. We feed everyone else's too.
Does this make you rethink some of the things you do, buy, and share with others online?
Readers, what do you think?
Read Next: Aspirational Marketing and the Unintended Irony of Pabst Beer
For Further Reading:
1) Thorstein Veblen's difficult but eye-opening book The Theory of the Leisure Class.
For a book written in 1899, it's astonishing how predictive it is of modern identity construction and modern consumerism.
2) 50 Cent’s best-known song.
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
The controversy centered around Jackson’s bankruptcy filing last year, and the unfortunate fact that he recently posted photographs of himself on social media sitting next to stacks of money.
Of course, when you declare bankruptcy you’re required to state honestly all of your assets and liabilities to the court. Thus the court quite reasonably thought the stacks of cash meant that 50 Cent lied about his financial position.
Which takes us to Fitty’s response: “Just because I am photographed in or next to a certain vehicle, wearing an article of clothing, holding a product, sitting next to what appears to be large sums of money or modeling expensive pieces of jewelry does not meant that I own everything in those photos.”
In other words, 50 Cent inadvertently caught himself in a branding Catch-22. If the money was real, he then shielded assets and lied to the court. If the money was fake, then his “brand” becomes fake to the point of self-parody.
As a quick thought experiment, imagine what else 50 Cent could have done with his stacks of “what appears to be large sums of money.” He could simply count his money, privately. He could take the photograph, but keep it to himself. Or, he could send the photo, quietly, to one or two friends.
Sounds ridiculous, right? Nobody takes a selfie next to a pile of money just to keep the photo to themselves.
Yet somehow putting that same photo on Instagram and broadcasting it to everyone becomes, weirdly, a legitimate act of branding. In fact, it’s hard to think of a more quintessential Veblen-esque * act than photographing yourself next to piles of money and sharing it on social media.
Except! When the money turns out to be fake, your personal brand looks awfully fake too. Equally as fake as, say, the brand on a can of Bumblebee Tuna, or a Sara Lee cake.
So what happens when a brand conflicts so overtly with reality? Well, for one thing, the owner of the brand will want to keep you from finding out the truth. Which is why 50 Cent has to hope his fans don't read too many articles about his problems with the bankruptcy court, and why Bumblebee Tuna has to hope that consumers reading about their recent tuna recall fail to notice all the facts--and fail to put two and two together.
However, those consumers who do find out the truth will no doubt feel cheated, ripped-off, and they'll quickly stop paying a price premium for your products. In fact, they’d be quite justified in no longer buying your products at all.
One last thought. It’s all too easy to criticize a celebrity for doing something like this. But we could ask ourselves similar questions about the things we do, buy and share. Social media was created to fulfill many of our status hierarchy and identity construction needs, and it does it so well that it's almost as if nothing counts any more unless there's some meta-representation of it online. These are self-branding events for us, and honestly, they’re often not all that different from what 50 Cent did.
Our acts of consumption and self-branding--and our sharing of them online--literally make life more difficult for everyone around us. How? By raising the status competition bar for others. Flashy purchases and flashy actions have a blast radius. Your friends, family, colleagues and neighbors exist in that blast radius. When we buy or do flashy things we don't just feed our own insatiable status competition urges. We feed everyone else's too.
Does this make you rethink some of the things you do, buy, and share with others online?
Readers, what do you think?
Read Next: Aspirational Marketing and the Unintended Irony of Pabst Beer
For Further Reading:
1) Thorstein Veblen's difficult but eye-opening book The Theory of the Leisure Class.
For a book written in 1899, it's astonishing how predictive it is of modern identity construction and modern consumerism.2) 50 Cent’s best-known song.
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
The REAL Story of the Bumblebee Tuna Recall Controversy: What it (Subtly) Teaches Us About Branding, Product Differentiation and Third-Party Manufacturing
There was a hidden issue in last week’s Bumblebee Tuna recall. It had nothing to do with food safety and everything to do with consumer empowerment. And you had to pay close attention to the facts to see it.
The conclusion? Bumblebee’s tuna recall makes a deafening case for why you should ignore branding. Completely.
Here’s why: Bumblebee was using a third-party canning company named Tri-Union Seafoods to produce their product. In addition, Tri-Union Seafoods was also making canned tuna for Chicken of the Sea. As we know, the tuna recall affected both brands.
What this means, then, is tuna labeled under both brands was processed and canned through the same machines at the same manufacturing facility. It’s also highly likely that Tri-Union makes canned tuna for other companies, including many store brands or generic brands in what’s called “private label manufacturing.”
The stuff is all made at the same facility. And none of it is actually made by the companies that own the brands!
And yet it’s sold to you on your grocery store shelves under various labels from various companies at prices varying by thirty, forty, even fifty percent.
Canned tuna, therefore, is now outed as yet another undifferentiated commodity product, branded, labeled and sold as faux-differentiated to consumers. We can now clearly see there is essentially zero difference between Bumblebee, Chicken of the Sea and any equivalent store brand.
If you still need more proof that branded consumer products are almost never worth a premium price, I can’t help you. I simply cannot help you.
This should change everything about how you perceive brands. When a paper label and a 40% higher price is the only difference between one product and another, why not embrace brand disloyalty? Shouldn’t you be rightly suspicious of paying extra... for no reason whatsoever?
Said even more strongly, you can confidently dismiss the branding, the premium pricing, or any of the various quality signals consumer products companies try to use to extract higher prices from you. You can dismiss all of it, and simply buy whichever product is on sale or costs the least on the day you happen to be shopping. In almost all cases, you’ll get a product of equivalent, if not identical, quality.
The central concept here, the idea I really want readers to bring home with them, is this: Across most consumer product categories, the generic product and various branded products sitting right next to each other on your store shelves are often made by the same third-party manufacturer. Many expensive branded products aren’t even made by the company that owns the brand. And it is becoming more and more common throughout the consumer products industry for well-known household brands to contract out practically their entire business to third-party manufacturers. [See here for more on this, and the story of one food company that embraced this strategy early on.]
Which means the brand, the label, and the premium pricing strategy are nothing more than fetishes for quality. They are cognitive shorthand. They influence us into falsely presuming the product is of higher quality, and that it’s therefore worth a significantly higher price.
Finally, please keep in mind: now that more and more companies have converted to third-party manufacturing, and as it becomes more and more painfully obvious to consumers they’ve done so, this strategy becomes all the more naked.
We consumers are following labels and fetishes, and we’re not receiving fair value in return. Do not mindlessly submit to brand-based purchasing.
Readers, what do you think? Share your thoughts!
Read Next: The Illusion of Control and How It's Used Against You
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
The conclusion? Bumblebee’s tuna recall makes a deafening case for why you should ignore branding. Completely.
Here’s why: Bumblebee was using a third-party canning company named Tri-Union Seafoods to produce their product. In addition, Tri-Union Seafoods was also making canned tuna for Chicken of the Sea. As we know, the tuna recall affected both brands.
What this means, then, is tuna labeled under both brands was processed and canned through the same machines at the same manufacturing facility. It’s also highly likely that Tri-Union makes canned tuna for other companies, including many store brands or generic brands in what’s called “private label manufacturing.”
The stuff is all made at the same facility. And none of it is actually made by the companies that own the brands!
And yet it’s sold to you on your grocery store shelves under various labels from various companies at prices varying by thirty, forty, even fifty percent.
Canned tuna, therefore, is now outed as yet another undifferentiated commodity product, branded, labeled and sold as faux-differentiated to consumers. We can now clearly see there is essentially zero difference between Bumblebee, Chicken of the Sea and any equivalent store brand.
If you still need more proof that branded consumer products are almost never worth a premium price, I can’t help you. I simply cannot help you.
This should change everything about how you perceive brands. When a paper label and a 40% higher price is the only difference between one product and another, why not embrace brand disloyalty? Shouldn’t you be rightly suspicious of paying extra... for no reason whatsoever?
Said even more strongly, you can confidently dismiss the branding, the premium pricing, or any of the various quality signals consumer products companies try to use to extract higher prices from you. You can dismiss all of it, and simply buy whichever product is on sale or costs the least on the day you happen to be shopping. In almost all cases, you’ll get a product of equivalent, if not identical, quality.
The central concept here, the idea I really want readers to bring home with them, is this: Across most consumer product categories, the generic product and various branded products sitting right next to each other on your store shelves are often made by the same third-party manufacturer. Many expensive branded products aren’t even made by the company that owns the brand. And it is becoming more and more common throughout the consumer products industry for well-known household brands to contract out practically their entire business to third-party manufacturers. [See here for more on this, and the story of one food company that embraced this strategy early on.]
Which means the brand, the label, and the premium pricing strategy are nothing more than fetishes for quality. They are cognitive shorthand. They influence us into falsely presuming the product is of higher quality, and that it’s therefore worth a significantly higher price.
Finally, please keep in mind: now that more and more companies have converted to third-party manufacturing, and as it becomes more and more painfully obvious to consumers they’ve done so, this strategy becomes all the more naked.
We consumers are following labels and fetishes, and we’re not receiving fair value in return. Do not mindlessly submit to brand-based purchasing.
Readers, what do you think? Share your thoughts!
Read Next: The Illusion of Control and How It's Used Against You
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
That Man Moved the Sanka!
In Robert Cialdini's exceptionally useful book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion,
there's a striking anecdote on a topic regularly seen here at Casual Kitchen: advertising and consumer empowerment. Read on:
"Advertisers have frequently harnessed the respect accorded to doctors in our culture by hiring actors to play the roles of doctors speaking on behalf of the product. My favorite example is a TV commercial featuring actor Robert Young counseling people against the dangers of caffeine and recommending caffeine-free Sanka Brand coffee. The commercial was highly successful, selling so much coffee that it was played for years in several versions. But why should this commercial prove so effective? Why on earth would we take Robert Young's word for the health consequences of decaffeinated coffee? Because—as the advertising agency that hired him knew perfectly well—he is associated in the minds of the American public with Marcus Welby, M.D., the role he played in an earlier long-running television series. Objectively it doesn't make sense to be swayed by the comments of a man we know to be just an actor who used to play a doctor. But, as a practical matter, that man moved the Sanka."
If you're even only vaguely interested your own consumer empowerment, Cialdini's book is a must-read. And while many readers today may not recognize the name "Marcus Welby," there are plenty of examples across today's advertising firmament that copy the Marcus Welby model. We all know the common advertising template of using a celebrity character from television or the movies to peddle product. It's just that today, in our post-media era, it's done in a more sophisticated or ironic way. But the effect is the same: it gets us to buy.
The real irony here, of course, was that Sanka tasted awful. It was a truly terrible product. Nowadays, thanks to far better decaffeination techniques, decaf coffee actually tastes like coffee. (You kids these days have no idea how lucky you are!)
But the funny thing about these types of celebrity endorsements is this: Yes, sure, they work--but once you think about why they work... well, all of a sudden they stop working so well.
Cialdini explains:
"From the first time I saw it, the most intriguing feature for me in the Robert Young Sanka commercial was its ability to use the influence of the authority principle without ever providing a real authority. The appearance of authority was enough. This tells us something important about unthinking reactions to authority figures... we are often as vulnerable to the symbols of authority as to the substance."
It wasn't just that this guy wasn't a doctor. He was an actor who played a doctor, who was using his "doctor-ness" to promote a product. On some level it's hilarious to think that this could work at all to sell product. And yet it did. Sanka sales--remember, sales of a product that didn't even taste any good--exploded upwards thanks to these ads.
Sanka print ad, circa 1979
"Okay, okay," you're thinking, “but that was the seventies. People were gullible dumb-asses back then. Today when we hear 'I'm not a doctor but I play one on TV' we laugh. We instantly hear satire. We're way too sophisticated to fall for this silly and transparent marketing trick."
Except we still do fall for it. It happens when Wilford Brimley, spokesman for the diabeetus, uses his trustworthy, old-country persona to promote Liberty Medical. Uh, and Quaker Oats. It happens when TD Ameritrade uses actor Sam Waterston (or more accurately, Waterston's earnest persona as Assistent DA Jack McCoy from Law and Order) to sell discount brokerage services. And yes, it even happens when two generations of Spocks ironically sell us Audis.
It's the same trick. They're still using it on us. And it still works.
Repeat after me: in the food industry and in the consumer products industry, advertising and marketing expenses are the single greatest source of costs, and they are always imputed in the final price of the products you buy. All branding and advertising costs are always passed through to the consumer.
If you buy any heavily-advertised product or service, recognize the role you are playing in the advertising-consumption cycle. You pay for those ads. Including the ones using phony symbols of authority to trick you into buying.
See advertising for what it really is: a destroyer of consumer value. Don't buy.
Read Next: Consumers: Pay For Your Own Brainwashing! (Or Don't)
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
there's a striking anecdote on a topic regularly seen here at Casual Kitchen: advertising and consumer empowerment. Read on: "Advertisers have frequently harnessed the respect accorded to doctors in our culture by hiring actors to play the roles of doctors speaking on behalf of the product. My favorite example is a TV commercial featuring actor Robert Young counseling people against the dangers of caffeine and recommending caffeine-free Sanka Brand coffee. The commercial was highly successful, selling so much coffee that it was played for years in several versions. But why should this commercial prove so effective? Why on earth would we take Robert Young's word for the health consequences of decaffeinated coffee? Because—as the advertising agency that hired him knew perfectly well—he is associated in the minds of the American public with Marcus Welby, M.D., the role he played in an earlier long-running television series. Objectively it doesn't make sense to be swayed by the comments of a man we know to be just an actor who used to play a doctor. But, as a practical matter, that man moved the Sanka."
If you're even only vaguely interested your own consumer empowerment, Cialdini's book is a must-read. And while many readers today may not recognize the name "Marcus Welby," there are plenty of examples across today's advertising firmament that copy the Marcus Welby model. We all know the common advertising template of using a celebrity character from television or the movies to peddle product. It's just that today, in our post-media era, it's done in a more sophisticated or ironic way. But the effect is the same: it gets us to buy.
The real irony here, of course, was that Sanka tasted awful. It was a truly terrible product. Nowadays, thanks to far better decaffeination techniques, decaf coffee actually tastes like coffee. (You kids these days have no idea how lucky you are!)
But the funny thing about these types of celebrity endorsements is this: Yes, sure, they work--but once you think about why they work... well, all of a sudden they stop working so well.
Cialdini explains:
"From the first time I saw it, the most intriguing feature for me in the Robert Young Sanka commercial was its ability to use the influence of the authority principle without ever providing a real authority. The appearance of authority was enough. This tells us something important about unthinking reactions to authority figures... we are often as vulnerable to the symbols of authority as to the substance."
It wasn't just that this guy wasn't a doctor. He was an actor who played a doctor, who was using his "doctor-ness" to promote a product. On some level it's hilarious to think that this could work at all to sell product. And yet it did. Sanka sales--remember, sales of a product that didn't even taste any good--exploded upwards thanks to these ads.
"Okay, okay," you're thinking, “but that was the seventies. People were gullible dumb-asses back then. Today when we hear 'I'm not a doctor but I play one on TV' we laugh. We instantly hear satire. We're way too sophisticated to fall for this silly and transparent marketing trick."
Except we still do fall for it. It happens when Wilford Brimley, spokesman for the diabeetus, uses his trustworthy, old-country persona to promote Liberty Medical. Uh, and Quaker Oats. It happens when TD Ameritrade uses actor Sam Waterston (or more accurately, Waterston's earnest persona as Assistent DA Jack McCoy from Law and Order) to sell discount brokerage services. And yes, it even happens when two generations of Spocks ironically sell us Audis.
It's the same trick. They're still using it on us. And it still works.
Repeat after me: in the food industry and in the consumer products industry, advertising and marketing expenses are the single greatest source of costs, and they are always imputed in the final price of the products you buy. All branding and advertising costs are always passed through to the consumer.
If you buy any heavily-advertised product or service, recognize the role you are playing in the advertising-consumption cycle. You pay for those ads. Including the ones using phony symbols of authority to trick you into buying.
See advertising for what it really is: a destroyer of consumer value. Don't buy.
Read Next: Consumers: Pay For Your Own Brainwashing! (Or Don't)
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
The Best Way To Save Money By Cooking From Your Pantry
1) What are the central traits of a good pantry recipe?
2) Can I build a well-stocked pantry and save money too?
3) How else can we think about pantry cooking and pantry recipes to maximize convenience and minimize food costs?
Readers, today we're going to talk about "cooking from the pantry," but we're going to tackle the topic in a way you won't see at the typical food blog. We're going to address pantry foods from a broader perspective, to see if we can arrive at some general principles readers can use to save both time and money.
Thinking More Broadly About the Pantry
Let's begin by thinking about what kinds of items we tend to find in the standard pantry. We'll start with the obvious:
* Canned goods (canned/diced/stewed tomatoes, beans, veggies, olives, etc.)
* Canned beans
* Dried beans and legumes (lentils, beans, chickpeas, split peas)
* Pasta
* Jarred/canned sauce
* Grains, oats, rice, brown rice
* Crackers, breadcrumbs
* Baking ingredients: Flour, cornmeal, sugars, oils, etc.
* Nuts
* Dried fruits, raisins, etc.
Great. But can we think a bit more broadly here? What about food items that, while they may not technically sit in your pantry, are essentially like pantry foods in that they can be conveniently kept on hand for a very long time?
How about considering foods we keep in our freezer? Some examples:
* Meats
* Homemade stock
* Frozen vegetables
* Frozen fruits
* Many freezable dairy items, including butter, cream, milk, buttermilk
Wonderful. But can we think even more broadly? What about long-lived refrigerator items? Once again, technically these aren't pantry foods per se, but many foods can be kept for surprisingly, even shockingly, long periods of time in the refrigerator. Fresh herbs and sturdy leafy greens can keep for weeks using the damp plastic bag method, while many of following examples of pantry-like items on the list below will keep for even longer.
* Eggs
* Hard cheeses (e.g., Parmesan)
* Very long-lived fridge vegetables (potatoes, onions, garlic, etc.)
* Moderately long-lived fridge vegetables (carrots, celery, leafy greens like kale, chard, etc.)
* Other: Sundried tomatoes in oil, homemade salad dressing, peanut butter, tahini sauce, lemon juice, etc.
I'm sure I'm missing lots of examples across these various categories, so readers, please share your own favorite staple items in the comments if you don’t already see them listed.
Convenience, Savings... or Both?
Now, the goal of building up a pantry can be convenience, savings, or both. If you don't care about cost, then all you have to do to build a maximum convenience pantry is look over your family's favorite recipes, identify those recipes made entirely or mostly from storable, long-lived ingredients, and then go buy a large supply of those ingredients. Voila, you're done.
But budget-minded consumers will see an obvious problem here: You're essentially carrying the grocery store's inventory for them in your own home--and paying money up front for the privilege. Using this approach to building a well-stocked pantry may actually increase your food costs. Again, though, if you don't care about the cost and have plenty of extra space in your kitchen, good for you. Just recognize that this is a move for convenience, not savings.
The thing is, we're frugal bastards here at Casual Kitchen, and convenience alone isn't enough for us. We want it all. We want convenience and savings.
The Rhythm of Retailing
Remember, there's a rhythm to the retailing of food, and discounting is a big part of that rhythm. You're likely to see attractive price discounts (say, 20-30% off) at one time or another for practically any given food item in your store. Occasionally, however, you'll see enormous discounts (50% off, or buy one/get two free sales) when the store or food supplier really needs to get rid of excess inventory.
Of course the grocery store isn't going to know which day you're going shopping (ironically, I'm pretty sure my grocery store does know… that's the only explanation I can come up with for them always seeming to put items on sale immediately *after* I buy them).
But all this just means that the consumer looking to maximize convenience and savings needs to add one more ingredient: patience. The patience to wait until your desired pantry items are available at deliciously attractive sale prices. This is when the savvy pantry-builder strikes, buying weeks or even months of supply.
A brief sidebar for newer readers. Many commodity foods--like dried pasta, canned tomatoes, canned beans and so on--are largely identical and interchangeable, and in some cases multiple brands are made by the same third party food company, sometimes even at the same manufacturing facility. Moreover, any of these brands might be offered on sale at any given time. Therefore, a savvy consumer, one who knows there’s little or no difference across brands, will get many, many more opportunities to acquire foods at sale prices. Why? Because they can take advantage and strike when any brand is on sale. This is yet another advantage of being an empowered, brand disloyal consumer.
A quick example: commodity dried pasta in my grocery store typically costs about $1.00 a pound for the store brand and anywhere from $1.29 to $1.49 or more for the various branded versions. I’m utterly indifferent to pasta brands, so when I see one brand marked down to an attractive 88c a pound, I'm going to both notice and strike. And when I see an extremely attractive sale price (recently one brand went on mega sale at 69c per 1 pound box), I'm going to really strike. That day I bought 15 pounds of pasta. It was an opportunity to stock up big time at a much lower cost than typical.
Okay. A moment ago we were talking about the extra ingredient of patience needed to build a truly low cost pantry built for both convenience and savings. That was a slight oversimplification: In reality, you need three things:
1) Patience (to wait for your sale),
2) Price knowledge (you have to have a decent sense of what things cost to be able to recognize really good prices when you see them), and
3) Aggressiveness (the willingness--even courage--to buy a lot when the opportunity presents itself).
Weirdly, this sounds a lot like investing in stocks, doesn't it?
Recipe Selection
We're almost done. Now, on to the final principle of competent pantry cooking: recipe selection. Once we begin to think of "pantry foods" in the broadest sense, including long-lived foods that we could store in our fridge and freezer as well as in our pantry, we've got an interesting and extremely wide range of possible ingredients to choose from. The challenge now is to have a decent database in your head of reasonably easy recipes built around those ingredients.
To give a few practical examples, I’ll share a few of the most pantry-friendly recipes we have here at Casual Kitchen:
Black Beans and Rice
A CK favorite recipe that lends itself beautifully to pantry cooking. Whenever we see green peppers on sale in the grocery store, we'll buy a few, chop them up, and freeze them in units sufficient to make a double batch. Once again, this is another example of thinking about pantry foods in a broader sense. All other ingredients in this recipe (canned black beans, onions, spices) we typically keep on hand.
Mole Sauce with Chicken
Another CK favorite that lends itself to pantry cooking. We'll generally always have some chicken in our freezer, and we usually keep a large inventory of canned stewed tomatoes. The rest of this recipe is just spices and unsweetened chocolate, items we always keep on hand.
Barley Pilaf
Barley keeps forever in dried form, and we just add whatever veggies (carrots, celery, mushrooms, etc.) we happen to have in our fridge.
Hilariously Easy Slow Cooker Bean Stew
A perfect, low-cost pantry recipe if there ever was one. All ingredients here are standard pantry items.
Hummus
A somewhat unexpectedly perfect pantry food. Canned chickpeas, lemon juice and tahini all keep nearly indefinitely in your pantry and fridge, respectively. In fact, our experiences suggest that tahini sauce never goes bad, ever. Enjoy with still more pantry items like crackers, or fridge items like carrots or celery.
But wait, we're not done! There are also many recipes that depend largely--but perhaps not entirely--on pantry items. With these recipes, sure, you may still have to go to the store, but you'll only need to buy one or two minor items. Yet again, this is a way to get food on the table with maximum convenience and minimum money. Here are some recipes that fit the bill:
North African Lemon Chicken
Pasta with Tuna, Olives and Roasted Red Peppers
Lentil Soup
Chipotle Crockpot Chili
Fried Rice
Risotto
Split Pea Soup
Once again, it's up to you to choose the specific pantry-centered recipes that your family really likes, and build the bulk of your cooking plans around those recipes.
"Cooking from the pantry" is one of those cooking concepts that--if we apply it broadly and with a little bit of patience--makes preparing healthy food at home incredibly easy and incredibly inexpensive.
So readers, let's hear your thoughts: What are your favorite pantry recipes? And what ideas would you add?
Read Next: Things Are Important Before They're Important
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
2) Can I build a well-stocked pantry and save money too?
3) How else can we think about pantry cooking and pantry recipes to maximize convenience and minimize food costs?
Readers, today we're going to talk about "cooking from the pantry," but we're going to tackle the topic in a way you won't see at the typical food blog. We're going to address pantry foods from a broader perspective, to see if we can arrive at some general principles readers can use to save both time and money.
Thinking More Broadly About the Pantry
Let's begin by thinking about what kinds of items we tend to find in the standard pantry. We'll start with the obvious:
* Canned goods (canned/diced/stewed tomatoes, beans, veggies, olives, etc.)
* Canned beans
* Dried beans and legumes (lentils, beans, chickpeas, split peas)
* Pasta
* Jarred/canned sauce
* Grains, oats, rice, brown rice
* Crackers, breadcrumbs
* Baking ingredients: Flour, cornmeal, sugars, oils, etc.
* Nuts
* Dried fruits, raisins, etc.
Great. But can we think a bit more broadly here? What about food items that, while they may not technically sit in your pantry, are essentially like pantry foods in that they can be conveniently kept on hand for a very long time?
How about considering foods we keep in our freezer? Some examples:
* Meats
* Homemade stock
* Frozen vegetables
* Frozen fruits
* Many freezable dairy items, including butter, cream, milk, buttermilk
Wonderful. But can we think even more broadly? What about long-lived refrigerator items? Once again, technically these aren't pantry foods per se, but many foods can be kept for surprisingly, even shockingly, long periods of time in the refrigerator. Fresh herbs and sturdy leafy greens can keep for weeks using the damp plastic bag method, while many of following examples of pantry-like items on the list below will keep for even longer.
* Eggs
* Hard cheeses (e.g., Parmesan)
* Very long-lived fridge vegetables (potatoes, onions, garlic, etc.)
* Moderately long-lived fridge vegetables (carrots, celery, leafy greens like kale, chard, etc.)
* Other: Sundried tomatoes in oil, homemade salad dressing, peanut butter, tahini sauce, lemon juice, etc.
I'm sure I'm missing lots of examples across these various categories, so readers, please share your own favorite staple items in the comments if you don’t already see them listed.
Convenience, Savings... or Both?
Now, the goal of building up a pantry can be convenience, savings, or both. If you don't care about cost, then all you have to do to build a maximum convenience pantry is look over your family's favorite recipes, identify those recipes made entirely or mostly from storable, long-lived ingredients, and then go buy a large supply of those ingredients. Voila, you're done.
But budget-minded consumers will see an obvious problem here: You're essentially carrying the grocery store's inventory for them in your own home--and paying money up front for the privilege. Using this approach to building a well-stocked pantry may actually increase your food costs. Again, though, if you don't care about the cost and have plenty of extra space in your kitchen, good for you. Just recognize that this is a move for convenience, not savings.
The thing is, we're frugal bastards here at Casual Kitchen, and convenience alone isn't enough for us. We want it all. We want convenience and savings.
The Rhythm of Retailing
Remember, there's a rhythm to the retailing of food, and discounting is a big part of that rhythm. You're likely to see attractive price discounts (say, 20-30% off) at one time or another for practically any given food item in your store. Occasionally, however, you'll see enormous discounts (50% off, or buy one/get two free sales) when the store or food supplier really needs to get rid of excess inventory.
Of course the grocery store isn't going to know which day you're going shopping (ironically, I'm pretty sure my grocery store does know… that's the only explanation I can come up with for them always seeming to put items on sale immediately *after* I buy them).
But all this just means that the consumer looking to maximize convenience and savings needs to add one more ingredient: patience. The patience to wait until your desired pantry items are available at deliciously attractive sale prices. This is when the savvy pantry-builder strikes, buying weeks or even months of supply.
A brief sidebar for newer readers. Many commodity foods--like dried pasta, canned tomatoes, canned beans and so on--are largely identical and interchangeable, and in some cases multiple brands are made by the same third party food company, sometimes even at the same manufacturing facility. Moreover, any of these brands might be offered on sale at any given time. Therefore, a savvy consumer, one who knows there’s little or no difference across brands, will get many, many more opportunities to acquire foods at sale prices. Why? Because they can take advantage and strike when any brand is on sale. This is yet another advantage of being an empowered, brand disloyal consumer.
A quick example: commodity dried pasta in my grocery store typically costs about $1.00 a pound for the store brand and anywhere from $1.29 to $1.49 or more for the various branded versions. I’m utterly indifferent to pasta brands, so when I see one brand marked down to an attractive 88c a pound, I'm going to both notice and strike. And when I see an extremely attractive sale price (recently one brand went on mega sale at 69c per 1 pound box), I'm going to really strike. That day I bought 15 pounds of pasta. It was an opportunity to stock up big time at a much lower cost than typical.
Okay. A moment ago we were talking about the extra ingredient of patience needed to build a truly low cost pantry built for both convenience and savings. That was a slight oversimplification: In reality, you need three things:
1) Patience (to wait for your sale),
2) Price knowledge (you have to have a decent sense of what things cost to be able to recognize really good prices when you see them), and
3) Aggressiveness (the willingness--even courage--to buy a lot when the opportunity presents itself).
Weirdly, this sounds a lot like investing in stocks, doesn't it?
Recipe Selection
We're almost done. Now, on to the final principle of competent pantry cooking: recipe selection. Once we begin to think of "pantry foods" in the broadest sense, including long-lived foods that we could store in our fridge and freezer as well as in our pantry, we've got an interesting and extremely wide range of possible ingredients to choose from. The challenge now is to have a decent database in your head of reasonably easy recipes built around those ingredients.
To give a few practical examples, I’ll share a few of the most pantry-friendly recipes we have here at Casual Kitchen:
Black Beans and Rice
A CK favorite recipe that lends itself beautifully to pantry cooking. Whenever we see green peppers on sale in the grocery store, we'll buy a few, chop them up, and freeze them in units sufficient to make a double batch. Once again, this is another example of thinking about pantry foods in a broader sense. All other ingredients in this recipe (canned black beans, onions, spices) we typically keep on hand.
Mole Sauce with Chicken
Another CK favorite that lends itself to pantry cooking. We'll generally always have some chicken in our freezer, and we usually keep a large inventory of canned stewed tomatoes. The rest of this recipe is just spices and unsweetened chocolate, items we always keep on hand.
Barley Pilaf
Barley keeps forever in dried form, and we just add whatever veggies (carrots, celery, mushrooms, etc.) we happen to have in our fridge.
Hilariously Easy Slow Cooker Bean Stew
A perfect, low-cost pantry recipe if there ever was one. All ingredients here are standard pantry items.
Hummus
A somewhat unexpectedly perfect pantry food. Canned chickpeas, lemon juice and tahini all keep nearly indefinitely in your pantry and fridge, respectively. In fact, our experiences suggest that tahini sauce never goes bad, ever. Enjoy with still more pantry items like crackers, or fridge items like carrots or celery.
But wait, we're not done! There are also many recipes that depend largely--but perhaps not entirely--on pantry items. With these recipes, sure, you may still have to go to the store, but you'll only need to buy one or two minor items. Yet again, this is a way to get food on the table with maximum convenience and minimum money. Here are some recipes that fit the bill:
North African Lemon Chicken
Pasta with Tuna, Olives and Roasted Red Peppers
Lentil Soup
Chipotle Crockpot Chili
Fried Rice
Risotto
Split Pea Soup
Once again, it's up to you to choose the specific pantry-centered recipes that your family really likes, and build the bulk of your cooking plans around those recipes.
"Cooking from the pantry" is one of those cooking concepts that--if we apply it broadly and with a little bit of patience--makes preparing healthy food at home incredibly easy and incredibly inexpensive.
So readers, let's hear your thoughts: What are your favorite pantry recipes? And what ideas would you add?
Read Next: Things Are Important Before They're Important
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
Branding By Bad Grammar
In my recent post on the return of scented consumer products, I made a snotty remark about ungrammatical label copy on a bottle of Ajax dish liquid. The label said:
Powerful Clean, Exhilarating Scent.™
I can't tell you how many times I've stared open-mouthed at that sentence, trying to make sense it.
There's clearly something wrong with this sentence, but it's not obvious what. Is there a comma missing? Should "powerful" be an adverb ("powerfully clean") rather than an adjective? More importantly, can you really trademark something written so badly?
This, readers, is nothing more than another branding technique. Its purpose is to capture and hold our attention. And it works exceptionally well.
Do you remember this slogan?
Toyota: Everyday
Or how about this one?
Think Different.
Also, if you listen really carefully, you should be able to hear a soft popping noise. That's the sound of grammar nazis' heads, exploding in the distance.
While some might consider it a generous service to humanity to dream up slogans that make grammar nazis' heads explode, this technique works differently--and in a far less generous way--on everyday non-grammar-nazi people. To a normal person, these words merely seem "off" somehow, and it causes our eyes to linger over the words for a just few moments longer than they normally would.
We're constantly surrounded by words, images, ad copy, merchandise and all sorts of commercial noise. It's too much for our minds to pay attention to it all, so we tune most of it out. But this subtle (and deeply irritating, at least to me) effect grabs a few extra milliseconds of our cognitive space before our brains move on to the next thing.
That's how a consumer products company calls attention to their dish liquid, despite the fact that it sits among a dozen essentially identical products. That's how you put a tiny little idea virus in peoples' heads so they'll remember your product, whether they want to or not.
And that's how you get consumers to buy.
Finally, readers, allow me to bestow upon you a new, fail-proof excuse you can use to get out of washing dishes:
"I can't do the dishes tonight honey, my inner grammar nazi is acting up. You wouldn't want my head to explode, would you?"
Read Next: 41 Ways You Can Help the Environment From Your Kitchen
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
Powerful Clean, Exhilarating Scent.™
I can't tell you how many times I've stared open-mouthed at that sentence, trying to make sense it.
There's clearly something wrong with this sentence, but it's not obvious what. Is there a comma missing? Should "powerful" be an adverb ("powerfully clean") rather than an adjective? More importantly, can you really trademark something written so badly?
This, readers, is nothing more than another branding technique. Its purpose is to capture and hold our attention. And it works exceptionally well.
Do you remember this slogan?
Toyota: Everyday
Or how about this one?
Think Different.
Also, if you listen really carefully, you should be able to hear a soft popping noise. That's the sound of grammar nazis' heads, exploding in the distance.
While some might consider it a generous service to humanity to dream up slogans that make grammar nazis' heads explode, this technique works differently--and in a far less generous way--on everyday non-grammar-nazi people. To a normal person, these words merely seem "off" somehow, and it causes our eyes to linger over the words for a just few moments longer than they normally would.
We're constantly surrounded by words, images, ad copy, merchandise and all sorts of commercial noise. It's too much for our minds to pay attention to it all, so we tune most of it out. But this subtle (and deeply irritating, at least to me) effect grabs a few extra milliseconds of our cognitive space before our brains move on to the next thing.
That's how a consumer products company calls attention to their dish liquid, despite the fact that it sits among a dozen essentially identical products. That's how you put a tiny little idea virus in peoples' heads so they'll remember your product, whether they want to or not.
And that's how you get consumers to buy.
Finally, readers, allow me to bestow upon you a new, fail-proof excuse you can use to get out of washing dishes:
"I can't do the dishes tonight honey, my inner grammar nazi is acting up. You wouldn't want my head to explode, would you?"
Read Next: 41 Ways You Can Help the Environment From Your Kitchen
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
The Return of Scent
"Everything smells like something these days."
Laura can really toss off the occasional Yogi Berra quote, and this one, a genuinely confounding one, came out during a conversation we were having about laundry detergent. Of all things.
What we were talking about was this: After more than a decade of consumer products companies heavily promoting perfume-free and dye-free soaps and detergents, have you noticed how smell is making a big comeback lately?
A few examples I've noticed recently:
1) Arm and Hammer laundry detergents now carry the label "Now with more scent!"
2) Purex laundry detergent now says "New! Now more freshening power" which, in the language of consumer products labels, essentially means "smells more."
3) Ajax recently rolled out some new, uh, flavors? of their dish liquid, and last month I brought home a bottle of Topical Lime Twist. It had a promotional sticker on top of the bottle saying, ungrammatically, "Powerful Clean, Exhilarating Scent™."
4) I've also noticed less and less shelf space dedicated to scent- and dye-free products in my local grocery store. The products are still there, but they're much less prominent than they were years ago.
Admittedly, these are just anecdotes. And, honestly, I'm still recovering somewhat from Tropical Lime Twist Ajax, because the smell reminds me, vividly, of Tostitos Hint of Lime tortilla chips. Which makes washing the dishes a rather bizarre olfactory experience.
But isn't it fascinating to see the return of scent on our store shelves? And what happened to the seemingly common consumer mindset from years ago that coloring and perfuming agents were undesirable? That they were potentially bad for us, bad for our skin and bad for our allergies? What changed?
I have a theory about what changed.
First, think about it: what's the difference between two detergents (or two cleaning products, or soaps, or dish liquids or whatever) if they both look and smell the same? Remember, smell and color are extremely strong and vivid cues. They are associative and they impact us emotionally and psychologically.
That impact is often both powerful and subconscious. A smell that reminds us of, say, the shampoo we used as kids or the laundry detergent our mothers used instantly brings back vivid memories and scenes from our childhood. This is a big component of consumer branding: it gets consumers comfortable with and habituated to a specific consumer product.
So, let's go back to the days when "no perfumes or dyes" was a selling point. How do you habituate a consumer to a product that doesn't have a distinctive smell or color? How can you build any long term associations or branding effects with your customers without using these two incredibly powerful cues?
We already know that the difference in quality across most brands is nominal at best. So in the eyes of the consumer, what really is the difference between two nearly identical cleaning products that both look and smell like nothing?
There's no difference at all.
That's why smell is making a comeback.
Read Next: Ten Tips on How to Cut Your Food Budget Using the 80/20 Rule
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
Laura can really toss off the occasional Yogi Berra quote, and this one, a genuinely confounding one, came out during a conversation we were having about laundry detergent. Of all things.
What we were talking about was this: After more than a decade of consumer products companies heavily promoting perfume-free and dye-free soaps and detergents, have you noticed how smell is making a big comeback lately?
A few examples I've noticed recently:
1) Arm and Hammer laundry detergents now carry the label "Now with more scent!"
2) Purex laundry detergent now says "New! Now more freshening power" which, in the language of consumer products labels, essentially means "smells more."
3) Ajax recently rolled out some new, uh, flavors? of their dish liquid, and last month I brought home a bottle of Topical Lime Twist. It had a promotional sticker on top of the bottle saying, ungrammatically, "Powerful Clean, Exhilarating Scent™."
4) I've also noticed less and less shelf space dedicated to scent- and dye-free products in my local grocery store. The products are still there, but they're much less prominent than they were years ago.
Admittedly, these are just anecdotes. And, honestly, I'm still recovering somewhat from Tropical Lime Twist Ajax, because the smell reminds me, vividly, of Tostitos Hint of Lime tortilla chips. Which makes washing the dishes a rather bizarre olfactory experience.
But isn't it fascinating to see the return of scent on our store shelves? And what happened to the seemingly common consumer mindset from years ago that coloring and perfuming agents were undesirable? That they were potentially bad for us, bad for our skin and bad for our allergies? What changed?
I have a theory about what changed.
First, think about it: what's the difference between two detergents (or two cleaning products, or soaps, or dish liquids or whatever) if they both look and smell the same? Remember, smell and color are extremely strong and vivid cues. They are associative and they impact us emotionally and psychologically.
That impact is often both powerful and subconscious. A smell that reminds us of, say, the shampoo we used as kids or the laundry detergent our mothers used instantly brings back vivid memories and scenes from our childhood. This is a big component of consumer branding: it gets consumers comfortable with and habituated to a specific consumer product.
So, let's go back to the days when "no perfumes or dyes" was a selling point. How do you habituate a consumer to a product that doesn't have a distinctive smell or color? How can you build any long term associations or branding effects with your customers without using these two incredibly powerful cues?
We already know that the difference in quality across most brands is nominal at best. So in the eyes of the consumer, what really is the difference between two nearly identical cleaning products that both look and smell like nothing?
There's no difference at all.
That's why smell is making a comeback.
Read Next: Ten Tips on How to Cut Your Food Budget Using the 80/20 Rule
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
Consumers: Pay For Your Own Brainwashing! (Or Don't)
"I don't know. I mean, I just can't really tell much of a difference."
Readers: This was Laura's declaration recently as she was using a cotton swab she'd fished out of our medicine drawer. I'd bought some Q-Tips brand cotton swabs the day before, and she accidentally mixed them up with a pile of lower-cost store brand swabs already sitting in there.
Without really thinking about it, she'd basically created a fairly robust blind test of the two brands. And she was unable to tell them apart.
Clearly, now, there's zero reason for us to pay extra for the higher-priced Q-Tips brand.
What's embarrassing about this (and kind of hypocritical too, if you're familiar with all I've written here on consumer empowerment) is how we here at Casual Kitchen just assumed Q-Tips were better. But why? What were our reasons?
Remember, consumer products companies spend years--and billions of dollars--on advertising to turn their brands into household names. Over time, these brands stick in your mind, as if they're part of the atmosphere. They seem familiar, comfortable and better. After all, you "know" these products, right? Thus it seems somehow reasonable that these comfortably familiar brands cost more.
It was basically that, plus years of habit-based purchases, that gave us our reason for assuming Q-Tips were better. Not much of a reason, to be honest. Especially since we were paying almost double the price of the store band swabs.
Needless to say, consumer product companies love it when consumers pay extra for their products using this kind of "reasoning."
But here's the problem, and it's a doozy: By definition, all branding and advertising costs are passed through to the consumer. Think about this for a second, because it brings us to a incredibly painful conclusion: If we believe a heavily advertised brand is somehow better, it's because we paid them to persuade us!
It's like paying for your own brainwashing.
Sure, some branded products actually are better. You might love Q-Tips more than life itself, and that's cool. But at least test the assumption. Don't just eat the extra cost and let your assumptions separate you from your money.
Furthermore, don't forget: we're in the modern era of do-nothing brands, where the brand owner may not even make the product but rather contracts it out to a third-party manufacturer. Does a "familiar" brand have real value if the only thing the company does is slap a sticker on the product... and charge you extra for the privilege?
A truly empowered consumer won't buy higher-cost branded products just because she's always bought them. She won't buy them just because she has a "feeling" that they're better. After all, how did that "feeling" get there? Through millions of dollars of advertising and marketing, done over years, paid for by you. You!
Make the companies that sell stuff compete for your money, not extract it from you by default. This is a central concept--if not the central concept--of consumer empowerment.
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
Readers: This was Laura's declaration recently as she was using a cotton swab she'd fished out of our medicine drawer. I'd bought some Q-Tips brand cotton swabs the day before, and she accidentally mixed them up with a pile of lower-cost store brand swabs already sitting in there.
Without really thinking about it, she'd basically created a fairly robust blind test of the two brands. And she was unable to tell them apart.
Clearly, now, there's zero reason for us to pay extra for the higher-priced Q-Tips brand.
What's embarrassing about this (and kind of hypocritical too, if you're familiar with all I've written here on consumer empowerment) is how we here at Casual Kitchen just assumed Q-Tips were better. But why? What were our reasons?
Remember, consumer products companies spend years--and billions of dollars--on advertising to turn their brands into household names. Over time, these brands stick in your mind, as if they're part of the atmosphere. They seem familiar, comfortable and better. After all, you "know" these products, right? Thus it seems somehow reasonable that these comfortably familiar brands cost more.
It was basically that, plus years of habit-based purchases, that gave us our reason for assuming Q-Tips were better. Not much of a reason, to be honest. Especially since we were paying almost double the price of the store band swabs.
Needless to say, consumer product companies love it when consumers pay extra for their products using this kind of "reasoning."
But here's the problem, and it's a doozy: By definition, all branding and advertising costs are passed through to the consumer. Think about this for a second, because it brings us to a incredibly painful conclusion: If we believe a heavily advertised brand is somehow better, it's because we paid them to persuade us!
It's like paying for your own brainwashing.
Sure, some branded products actually are better. You might love Q-Tips more than life itself, and that's cool. But at least test the assumption. Don't just eat the extra cost and let your assumptions separate you from your money.
Furthermore, don't forget: we're in the modern era of do-nothing brands, where the brand owner may not even make the product but rather contracts it out to a third-party manufacturer. Does a "familiar" brand have real value if the only thing the company does is slap a sticker on the product... and charge you extra for the privilege?
A truly empowered consumer won't buy higher-cost branded products just because she's always bought them. She won't buy them just because she has a "feeling" that they're better. After all, how did that "feeling" get there? Through millions of dollars of advertising and marketing, done over years, paid for by you. You!
Make the companies that sell stuff compete for your money, not extract it from you by default. This is a central concept--if not the central concept--of consumer empowerment.
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
Never From Concentrate? Never Again
Readers, you're about to read why I'll never buy another container of Tropicana Pure Premium Orange Juice--ever again.
*********************************
How is it possible that every carton you've ever had of Tropicana Pure Premium--every single carton--tastes exactly the same?
The "Never From Concentrate" Tropicana OJ you drank last week tastes the same as the stuff you had last summer. Even more weirdly, it tastes exactly the same as the cartons you bought a year ago. And the year before that.
Seriously, if this is supposed to be real juice, then how is that possible?
It's possible because that delicious and impossibly uniform Tropicana taste is entirely manufactured.
Tropicana's process involves juicing oranges, pasteurizing the juice, and then "de-aerating" the juice--a fancy word for storing the juice in an environment that's stripped of oxygen. Juice that's been processed in this way can then be stored for extremely long periods of time without spoiling. And that enables Tropicana to store juice inventory for months--thereby selling you "fresh juice" when oranges aren't remotely in season.
The thing is, this industrialized process also produces juice that basically tastes like nothing. Which brings us to the worst part of all: Tropicana then adds back flavoring and fragrance agents to their juice, using so-called "flavor packs" that are engineered to replicate a specific and consistent scent and taste. And because these flavoring and fragrance additives are technically made from oranges, Tropicana can still claim their juice is all-natural and never from concentrate.
That's why every single carton of orange juice tastes--freakishly--exactly the same. It has been manufactured that way.
When I first began to learn about the flavoring, scenting and storage processes behind the market's best-selling orange juice, I quite simply couldn't believe it. Or maybe, after too many years of habitually paying a huge price premium to buy a skillfully-branded product, I just didn't want to believe it.
But once you think it through, it's inherently logical. Oranges from different years don't taste exactly the same. It is quite simply not possible--and not natural--to harvest and produce totally identical-tasting fruit juice from season to season and year to year. Mother Nature simply does not work that way. Tropicana would have to do something to their juice to make it perfectly uniform.
Here's another thought. Yes, it's weird that this brand of orange juice tastes exactly the same all over the United States, all year round. But it's even weirder that until a few months ago, it never crossed my mind that this might be weird. And I'm a food blogger! This is how far we as consumers have gotten from the food we eat.
In reality, the frozen concentrate orange juice in the freezer compartment suddenly doesn't look quite so bad in comparison. Yes, it's equally processed and manufactured, but it sells for one third the price. More importantly, it may more accurately reflect the true taste of orange juice. Things aren't always as they seem, are they?
Readers, ask yourselves: is this simulacrum of fresh orange juice really worth a premium price? Share your thoughts!
Sources:
Freshly Squeezed: The Truth About Orange Juice in Boxes (Civil Eats)
The Secret Ingredient In Your Orange Juice (Food Renegade)
The Secret Ingredient In Orange Juice, Is NOT Orange (Healthy Times Blog)
Tropicana: Our 100% Juice Could Contain "Anything From Nature," Even Dairy (Consumerist)
Alissa Hamilton's book Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!
*********************************
How is it possible that every carton you've ever had of Tropicana Pure Premium--every single carton--tastes exactly the same?
The "Never From Concentrate" Tropicana OJ you drank last week tastes the same as the stuff you had last summer. Even more weirdly, it tastes exactly the same as the cartons you bought a year ago. And the year before that.
Seriously, if this is supposed to be real juice, then how is that possible?
It's possible because that delicious and impossibly uniform Tropicana taste is entirely manufactured.
Tropicana's process involves juicing oranges, pasteurizing the juice, and then "de-aerating" the juice--a fancy word for storing the juice in an environment that's stripped of oxygen. Juice that's been processed in this way can then be stored for extremely long periods of time without spoiling. And that enables Tropicana to store juice inventory for months--thereby selling you "fresh juice" when oranges aren't remotely in season.
The thing is, this industrialized process also produces juice that basically tastes like nothing. Which brings us to the worst part of all: Tropicana then adds back flavoring and fragrance agents to their juice, using so-called "flavor packs" that are engineered to replicate a specific and consistent scent and taste. And because these flavoring and fragrance additives are technically made from oranges, Tropicana can still claim their juice is all-natural and never from concentrate.
That's why every single carton of orange juice tastes--freakishly--exactly the same. It has been manufactured that way.
When I first began to learn about the flavoring, scenting and storage processes behind the market's best-selling orange juice, I quite simply couldn't believe it. Or maybe, after too many years of habitually paying a huge price premium to buy a skillfully-branded product, I just didn't want to believe it.
But once you think it through, it's inherently logical. Oranges from different years don't taste exactly the same. It is quite simply not possible--and not natural--to harvest and produce totally identical-tasting fruit juice from season to season and year to year. Mother Nature simply does not work that way. Tropicana would have to do something to their juice to make it perfectly uniform.
Here's another thought. Yes, it's weird that this brand of orange juice tastes exactly the same all over the United States, all year round. But it's even weirder that until a few months ago, it never crossed my mind that this might be weird. And I'm a food blogger! This is how far we as consumers have gotten from the food we eat.
In reality, the frozen concentrate orange juice in the freezer compartment suddenly doesn't look quite so bad in comparison. Yes, it's equally processed and manufactured, but it sells for one third the price. More importantly, it may more accurately reflect the true taste of orange juice. Things aren't always as they seem, are they?
Readers, ask yourselves: is this simulacrum of fresh orange juice really worth a premium price? Share your thoughts!
Sources:
Freshly Squeezed: The Truth About Orange Juice in Boxes (Civil Eats)
The Secret Ingredient In Your Orange Juice (Food Renegade)
The Secret Ingredient In Orange Juice, Is NOT Orange (Healthy Times Blog)
Tropicana: Our 100% Juice Could Contain "Anything From Nature," Even Dairy (Consumerist)
Alissa Hamilton's book Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com
via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!
Still Sixteen Ounces
I'd like to share something that strikes me as hilarious. Look at the following photo: Anything seem unusual?
This otherwise normal container of delicious Ben & Jerry's ice cream says "Still 16oz" on the label. Repeatedly.
Now, why would Ben & Jerry's do that?
Well, because a key competitor in the so-called high end ice cream category, Häagen-Dazs, has recently employed stealth price hike tactics, cutting their container size from 16 ounces to 14 ounces. This effectively works out to a per-unit price increase of 14.3%.
It's also worth noting that these "pint" containers of Häagen-Dazs appear noticeably smaller on store shelves now, which kind of takes the "stealth" out of this stealth price hike.
In response, Ben & Jerry's is doing just what any self-respecting, honest company should do: competing for your consumer dollars. They didn't put a stealth price hike over on us, and they have every right to tell us about it. Hey, these guys rule.
Of course, as a consumer, you have your own options and alternatives. And if you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you know exactly what you can do: practice brand disloyalty--and drop Häagen-Dazs like a bad habit.
Readers, what are your thoughts?
Related Posts:
Why Davis Baking Powder Put in a 23% Stealth Price Hike
Companies vs. Consumers: A Manifesto
Understanding the Consumer Products Industry
What's Your Favorite Consumer Empowerment Tip?
The Mysteriously Shrinking Hershey's Bar
Ask CK: How Do You Like Your Prices Raised?
Can You Resist $107 Worth of Advertising?
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!
This otherwise normal container of delicious Ben & Jerry's ice cream says "Still 16oz" on the label. Repeatedly.
Now, why would Ben & Jerry's do that?
Well, because a key competitor in the so-called high end ice cream category, Häagen-Dazs, has recently employed stealth price hike tactics, cutting their container size from 16 ounces to 14 ounces. This effectively works out to a per-unit price increase of 14.3%.
It's also worth noting that these "pint" containers of Häagen-Dazs appear noticeably smaller on store shelves now, which kind of takes the "stealth" out of this stealth price hike.
In response, Ben & Jerry's is doing just what any self-respecting, honest company should do: competing for your consumer dollars. They didn't put a stealth price hike over on us, and they have every right to tell us about it. Hey, these guys rule.
Of course, as a consumer, you have your own options and alternatives. And if you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you know exactly what you can do: practice brand disloyalty--and drop Häagen-Dazs like a bad habit.
Readers, what are your thoughts?
Related Posts:
Why Davis Baking Powder Put in a 23% Stealth Price Hike
Companies vs. Consumers: A Manifesto
Understanding the Consumer Products Industry
What's Your Favorite Consumer Empowerment Tip?
The Mysteriously Shrinking Hershey's Bar
Ask CK: How Do You Like Your Prices Raised?
Can You Resist $107 Worth of Advertising?
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com
via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!
Ask CK: How Do You Like Your Prices Raised?
If you have a question you'd like to ask Casual Kitchen, send it in!!
**********************************
Reader Julia at Grow. Cook. Eat. asks me an exceptional question:
I'm curious to know how you would prefer to see companies raise their prices. Inflation is inevitable. As the cost of inputs goes up (not just the cocoa, but also fuel for transportation, etc), so does the cost of production. We can't expect food-companies to keep prices the same indefinitely (or can we?).
This is a fascinating question, although I'd like to first take minor issue with Julia's premise: In my view, price inflation isn't always inevitable. It's common, granted. But pricing trends have been anything but consistent over the past decades across many products and services. And hidden in this wide range of pricing trends is a key to becoming a more empowered consumer.
Again, granted, some prices only seem to go up. The price of most meats and almost all branded cookies, crackers, soda, etc., rise consistently--as do many personal services, like haircuts and restaurant meals. At the same time, however, prices of many other foods have stayed surprisingly stable. Quite a few products, like dried lentils, canned and dried beans, potatoes, carrots, cabbage and other foods can often be purchased at prices not much higher than what I paid when I first moved out on my own some twenty years ago.
Further, some areas of the grocery store, thanks to new competition, are facing falling prices: for example, I can now buy most of my spices at lower prices than I paid just a few years ago, thanks to increased competition from some new spice suppliers now on grocery store shelves. (Long time readers will know exactly why this warms my heart.)
Finally, there are some segments of the consumer products world where prices go through secular declines: consumer electronics, computers, cellphones and cellphone service all cost a fraction (and in some cases a tiny fraction) of what they cost a decade or two decades ago. Even our cable bills, long a bastion of steady annual price increases, are starting to sag in the face of other, less expensive ways to watch TV. (If you haven't called your cable company recently and asked for a price concession, please do so. Right now. I'll wait.)
Okay. Eons ago, when I was getting paid to pick stocks on Wall Street, we had an expression for companies that tried to put through price increases. We'd ask, "So, is their price hike going to stick?" In other words, would their customers accept the price hike? More importantly, did their customers have other suppliers or substitutes that they could turn to if they wanted to resist the price hike? These were the key factors that drove whether a price hike would "stick"--or if the company had to cave in and roll that price hike back.
And this, I firmly believe, is the key to empowering consumers when we face price hikes.
I'll even go further, and argue that we consumers have simply conditioned ourselves to accept regular price increases with certain products. Among the worst offenders: branded, heavily-advertised products and second-order foods. Yes, we notice them (usually), grumble a bit to ourselves, and maybe even mentally shake our fists at Big Food. But then we willingly take these products to the checkout line and buy them anyway.
Maybe, just maybe, we should entirely rethink these purchases. What if we quit buying them--or drastically cut back--and made the makers of those products cave in and roll back their prices? We are already beginning to see this happening across some branded food categories, as consumers are rising up, adjusting their purchasing habits, and finding substitutes for branded products that are priced above their real value. As a result, companies like Unilever and Proctor & Gamble, after years of subjecting us to steady, consistent price hikes, are finding a the rules are changing. They've had to step up discounting and cut prices in order to maintain sales. In other words, consumers are pushing back--and these companies are caving.
So with that as a backdrop: here's how I'd like my price hikes: I'd like them to be clear, not hidden. Overt, not stealthy. In other words, pretty much the exact opposite of what Hershey's and Davis Baking Powder did.
Look: if you're going to raise prices, don't hide it. Just admit it and own up to it. If your product is worth the extra value, I will still pay for it. And if you try to sneak a stealth price hike past me, I will drop your product like a bad habit.
Readers, what's your view? How do you like your prices raised?
Related Posts:
The Do-Nothing Brand
Divorce Yourself from the False Reality of Your Grocery Store
Ten Thoughts On the True Value of Brands
Brand Disloyalty
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!
**********************************
Reader Julia at Grow. Cook. Eat. asks me an exceptional question:
I'm curious to know how you would prefer to see companies raise their prices. Inflation is inevitable. As the cost of inputs goes up (not just the cocoa, but also fuel for transportation, etc), so does the cost of production. We can't expect food-companies to keep prices the same indefinitely (or can we?).
This is a fascinating question, although I'd like to first take minor issue with Julia's premise: In my view, price inflation isn't always inevitable. It's common, granted. But pricing trends have been anything but consistent over the past decades across many products and services. And hidden in this wide range of pricing trends is a key to becoming a more empowered consumer.
Again, granted, some prices only seem to go up. The price of most meats and almost all branded cookies, crackers, soda, etc., rise consistently--as do many personal services, like haircuts and restaurant meals. At the same time, however, prices of many other foods have stayed surprisingly stable. Quite a few products, like dried lentils, canned and dried beans, potatoes, carrots, cabbage and other foods can often be purchased at prices not much higher than what I paid when I first moved out on my own some twenty years ago.
Further, some areas of the grocery store, thanks to new competition, are facing falling prices: for example, I can now buy most of my spices at lower prices than I paid just a few years ago, thanks to increased competition from some new spice suppliers now on grocery store shelves. (Long time readers will know exactly why this warms my heart.)
Finally, there are some segments of the consumer products world where prices go through secular declines: consumer electronics, computers, cellphones and cellphone service all cost a fraction (and in some cases a tiny fraction) of what they cost a decade or two decades ago. Even our cable bills, long a bastion of steady annual price increases, are starting to sag in the face of other, less expensive ways to watch TV. (If you haven't called your cable company recently and asked for a price concession, please do so. Right now. I'll wait.)
Okay. Eons ago, when I was getting paid to pick stocks on Wall Street, we had an expression for companies that tried to put through price increases. We'd ask, "So, is their price hike going to stick?" In other words, would their customers accept the price hike? More importantly, did their customers have other suppliers or substitutes that they could turn to if they wanted to resist the price hike? These were the key factors that drove whether a price hike would "stick"--or if the company had to cave in and roll that price hike back.
And this, I firmly believe, is the key to empowering consumers when we face price hikes.
I'll even go further, and argue that we consumers have simply conditioned ourselves to accept regular price increases with certain products. Among the worst offenders: branded, heavily-advertised products and second-order foods. Yes, we notice them (usually), grumble a bit to ourselves, and maybe even mentally shake our fists at Big Food. But then we willingly take these products to the checkout line and buy them anyway.
Maybe, just maybe, we should entirely rethink these purchases. What if we quit buying them--or drastically cut back--and made the makers of those products cave in and roll back their prices? We are already beginning to see this happening across some branded food categories, as consumers are rising up, adjusting their purchasing habits, and finding substitutes for branded products that are priced above their real value. As a result, companies like Unilever and Proctor & Gamble, after years of subjecting us to steady, consistent price hikes, are finding a the rules are changing. They've had to step up discounting and cut prices in order to maintain sales. In other words, consumers are pushing back--and these companies are caving.
So with that as a backdrop: here's how I'd like my price hikes: I'd like them to be clear, not hidden. Overt, not stealthy. In other words, pretty much the exact opposite of what Hershey's and Davis Baking Powder did.
Look: if you're going to raise prices, don't hide it. Just admit it and own up to it. If your product is worth the extra value, I will still pay for it. And if you try to sneak a stealth price hike past me, I will drop your product like a bad habit.
Readers, what's your view? How do you like your prices raised?
Related Posts:
The Do-Nothing Brand
Divorce Yourself from the False Reality of Your Grocery Store
Ten Thoughts On the True Value of Brands
Brand Disloyalty
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com
via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!
The Mysteriously Shrinking Hershey's Bar
The other day a wonderful thing--and an awful thing--happened to me.
I was sitting at my computer, drafting up a monumental multi-part post that when published will shake the earth to its very core. Suddenly, Laura came up behind me and placed two wonderful things on my desk: a stack of twenty dollar bills, and a half pound Hershey's Special Dark Chocolate bar.
Okay. A couple of things. First don't start thinking that Laura lost some bet or that we have some kind of weird financial relationship (well, we do, but it's way weirder than you could ever imagine). She just happened to stop at the ATM on her way home from running errands. You see, now that I've been out of my Wall Street career for three years and am embracing my new role as Laura's stay-at-home cook/cabana boy, the one remaining manly thing I still do is hold the cash. So she got some dough and gave it to me.
Second, and even more weird, I'll admit up front that for me, a bar of Hershey's Special Dark is a deeply guilty pleasure (or as they say more elegantly in Spanish, un placer culpable). Look, there are so many additives in this chocolate that it's iffy even to call it "chocolate." But for some reason I have always been mindlessly sentimental with this brand of chocolate--I think because at a very very early age I developed a taste for dark chocolate (a regrettable genetic trait in our family), and Hershey's Special Dark was hella better than the crap milk chocolate Hershey bars that were so widely available back then.
Milk chocolate. Sheesh, what a waste.
Now, where was I? Ah yes, the awful thing. Well, this "half-pound" chocolate bar, as everybody knows, no longer weighs half a pound. It faced the grocery store shrink ray years ago, and now this bar of chocolate weighs 6.8 ounces.
What's insidious about this, of course, is that Hershey's can keep the price the same, slash the product's weight, and effectively extract a 17.6% stealth price increase from consumers. Nice. Heck, they can even claim that their "food" doesn't contain as many calories as it used to.
But what really, really frosted me was that they had the temerity to write "Giant Bar" on the label. Giant? Giant compared to what?
Yet another reason to practice brand disloyalty if you ask me. Readers, what's your view?
Related Posts:
Understanding the Consumer Products Industry (Full Archive)
What's Your Favorite Consumer Empowerment Tip?
Organic Food, Chemicals, and Worrying About All the Wrong Things
On Spice Fade, And the Utter Insanity of Throwing Spices Out After Six Months
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!
I was sitting at my computer, drafting up a monumental multi-part post that when published will shake the earth to its very core. Suddenly, Laura came up behind me and placed two wonderful things on my desk: a stack of twenty dollar bills, and a half pound Hershey's Special Dark Chocolate bar.
Okay. A couple of things. First don't start thinking that Laura lost some bet or that we have some kind of weird financial relationship (well, we do, but it's way weirder than you could ever imagine). She just happened to stop at the ATM on her way home from running errands. You see, now that I've been out of my Wall Street career for three years and am embracing my new role as Laura's stay-at-home cook/cabana boy, the one remaining manly thing I still do is hold the cash. So she got some dough and gave it to me.
Second, and even more weird, I'll admit up front that for me, a bar of Hershey's Special Dark is a deeply guilty pleasure (or as they say more elegantly in Spanish, un placer culpable). Look, there are so many additives in this chocolate that it's iffy even to call it "chocolate." But for some reason I have always been mindlessly sentimental with this brand of chocolate--I think because at a very very early age I developed a taste for dark chocolate (a regrettable genetic trait in our family), and Hershey's Special Dark was hella better than the crap milk chocolate Hershey bars that were so widely available back then.
Milk chocolate. Sheesh, what a waste.
Now, where was I? Ah yes, the awful thing. Well, this "half-pound" chocolate bar, as everybody knows, no longer weighs half a pound. It faced the grocery store shrink ray years ago, and now this bar of chocolate weighs 6.8 ounces.
What's insidious about this, of course, is that Hershey's can keep the price the same, slash the product's weight, and effectively extract a 17.6% stealth price increase from consumers. Nice. Heck, they can even claim that their "food" doesn't contain as many calories as it used to.
But what really, really frosted me was that they had the temerity to write "Giant Bar" on the label. Giant? Giant compared to what?
Yet another reason to practice brand disloyalty if you ask me. Readers, what's your view?
Related Posts:
Understanding the Consumer Products Industry (Full Archive)
What's Your Favorite Consumer Empowerment Tip?
Organic Food, Chemicals, and Worrying About All the Wrong Things
On Spice Fade, And the Utter Insanity of Throwing Spices Out After Six Months
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com
via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!
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