Insight: Born to be branded

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

Janet Robinson, the former Chief Executive Officer of the New York Times, thinks that there is a significant difference between customers who purchase for convenience and those who are highly loyal to certain products.

“Repeat business or behavior can be bribed. Loyalty has to be earned," Robinson once said.

I’m not entirely sure that’s the case and taking a closer look into my upbringing shows that not all brand loyalty is passed down from parents to children. That’s a process marketing agencies call consumer socialization, where family habits, emotional rituals, and shared identities shape long-term product choices.

Those who subscribe to that theory say that the routine of everyday domestic life can embed certain product brands deep into the emotional framework of our childhood. They can cite studies showing that a parent's passion for certain brands may transfer directly to their children through shared experiences and nostalgic association later in life.

No matter if it’s a cleaning product, a brand of juice, a type of car, or a breakfast cereal, marketers believe that children start identifying brand names as early as 24 months old, and many have developed favorite specific brands by the time they reach first grade.

As for me, I grew up in the 1960s and would accompany my mother on her shopping trips to the neighborhood grocery store. Having grown up in poverty during the Great Depression, she was set in her ways and fiercely loyal to her chosen products and brands.

She did most of the cooking for our family and would also make the lunches that my brother and I would take to school. We grew up eating the products she would select, and she had come to rely on as an adult.

Among her favorite products and brand names were Chicken of the Sea tuna fish in vegetable oil; Campbell’s Pork and Beans, Campbell’s condensed soups, Hellmann’s mayonnaise, Heinz ketchup, French’s mustard, Archway cookies and Del Monte canned fruit and vegetables. She also would bring home Peter Pan peanut butter, Mister Salty pretzels, Welch’s grape jelly, Chase & Sanborn coffee, Lipton teabags, cartons of Sealtest milk, Swanson TV dinners, Dream Whip powdered topping, Minute Rice, cans of Franco American Spaghetti and Meatballs, and Chef Boyardee Beefaroni.

My mother didn’t bake very much and instead would purchase Hostess snowballs, cupcakes and Twinkies to put in our lunchbox. Sandwiches were made with Wonder Bread and cans of Hershey's Syrup were purchased for making chocolate milk. She’d buy Pepsodent toothpaste to brush out teeth with, Breck shampoo, Brylcreem hair cream, Oxydol laundry soap, Comet cleanser, Ivory soap for the bathroom, and Joy dish soap.

Purchases made by my father were usually something sweet to be shared with the kids like Fruit Stripe chewing gum, a tub of orange sherbet, boxes of Cracker Jack, bottles of Hires Root Beer or Grape Nehi soda pop.

In all the time that I lived with my parents growing up, they never wavered in the products and brands they were loyal to and were steadfast in their choices.

My own personal picks for products and certain brands came not from the theory of consumer socialization passed down by my parents, but from the reality of higher living expenses and inflation of the 1970s and new technology such as the invention of the microwave oven in the 1980s.

While still in college and making $2.50 an hour, I shopped for groceries based upon the most affordable price and value. A few years later, I was earning a regular paycheck while serving in the U.S. Air Force and my priorities changed. I could afford more brand-name products and a few of the products I grew up with became regular items in my food pantry.

An inspection of my kitchen shelves and refrigerator in the 1970s and 1980s would reveal new products created in the 1960s such as Pop Tarts, Shake 'n Bake coating mix for chicken and pork, Cool Whip whipped topping, Bugles snacks, and jars of Tang instant orange-flavored drink mix made popular by TV commercials with astronauts. I also developed a liking for crunchy peanut butter, but my brand of choice became Skippy or Jif. I brushed my teeth with Closeup toothpaste and sometimes every now and then, I would buy a package of Freshen Up cinnamon liquid center chewing gum.

One Thanksgiving Day around 2008 my mother was our guest, and she looked in our cupboard and spotted several cans of Campbell’s Bean and Bacon soup, a jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise and a small can of Campbell’s Pork and Beans. She mentioned to my wife Nancy that she always fed me Campbell’s Bean and Bacon soup for lunch in the winter and she was happy that it was still a favorite of mine.

Maybe there’s some truth to her embedding product brands deep into the emotional framework of my childhood, although now I purchase canned tuna fish in water, haven’t bought Wonder Bread in decades and Swansons stopped selling TV dinners in America years ago.

Hires Root Beer is long extinct and so is Freshen Up chewing gum. Franco American is no more, and the Mister Salty pretzel brand was phased out in the 1990s.

Time marches on. <