works of wanderlust

I’ve been thinking a lot about brand loyalty lately.

I’m surrounded by food these days. Overflowing shelves packed with things that seem delicious and interesting and unique—but yet I don’t recognize a single brand name.  It might sound like I’m describing some kind of weird suburban middle-aged man’s nightmare. But no. On the contrary. I’ve just been wandering the aisles of a local grocery store that specializes in importing and selling products that either originate in Europe and Asia or serve a more eclectic low-volume local food producer niche (like organic and vegan and gluten-free, say.) And my “regular” grocery store doesn’t stock much of this, or if they do it is relegated to a single aisle down which my cart rarely turns because, well—I have this kinda sorta outdated idea of brand loyalty stuck in my thick craw.

I’m going to be shopping at this new place a lot more in the foreseeable future. Reasons. If you know you know kinda reasons.

But that does mean that I’ll really need to get over my brand loyalty complex and get a little less picky about scanning the shelves for those familiar brands which I’ve been eating my whole life. 

Because I just have.

After all, brand loyalty has a lot to do with habit, doesn’t it?  We like to tell ourselves it’s about quality or consistency or other jibber-jabber ideas, but in the end—I mean if we’re really being honest with ourselves—it’s a lot to do with habit.  How many of us, honestly, have tried a different brand of ketchup with enough gusto to give it a proper chance? How many of us stray from our regular brand of margarine? Or even try a unique variety of salad dressing, let alone a whole other brand name?

Oh, I know you adventurous types exist—maybe you’re even in the majority in this little subset of readers reading a food-ish blog—but take your average ordinary grocery shopper and I have a gut vibe check on that, and know how I personally shop, and so long as price isn’t really a factor then—well—I’m a brand loyal guy through and through.

But it’s all just habit. Lowering the cognitive load of changing things up. Climbing out of that rut is hard work, right?

We shop when we travel. 

I mean, even when we go to the mountains for a weekend, we hit the grocery store and buy at least half our meals to prep in a rental kitchen (assuming and assuring the condo or whatever we rent usually has some kind of kitchen.)  The grocery store in our favourite mountain town, though, is just another cookie cutter version of our local everyday store. Maybe that’s a bad example. 

But here’s a better one: when we traveled to Europe last year—we went shopping. We hit up the local markets and grocery stores and bought up breakfast foods and stuff to make sandwhiches and you know what? Gasp. Surprise. How odd? We couldn’t find all those North American brands in the corner grocery store in Paris or Milan. Who’d have thunk it, huh?

Of course we didn’t.

And yeah, its the adventure of travel. A different brand of milk. A strange box of cereal. A little jar of jam with a label in a foreign language and I’m pretty sure that says “strawberry” but I could totally be wrong, right? Adventure!

But then you go back home, settle back into your routine and you’re there, right back there, buying the familiar brands to which you have built up a habitual loyalty. And that’s okay, too? It really is.

But why?

Brand loyalty. Maybe it’s just really good marketing. Maybe it really is about quality. Yet, I like to think it has more to do with something I alluded to a couple paragraphs back: you gotta think more when you shift brands. There is a cognitive hurdle to leap over. There is a decision to make. If you’re already trying to figure out what to make for dinner for the next three days, who wants to add to the complexity by deciding if maybe we should switch up the brand of soy sauce, coffee, or cheese we’ve been buying for twenty years.  Some day I’ll write a whole post about the day I invented a new spaghetti sauce standard in our house and the kerfuffle that caused—and yet now that we’ve cleared the chasm between the old way and the new way, we can’t imagine doing it the old way any more.  It was all brand loyalty and breaking habits.

I think about brand loyalty a lot when I’m wandering those aisles. People are going to shop at a store like this one, maybe for the first time or maybe over and over for a few things here and a few things there, and every new product they put in their cart is a decision they need to make? Right there. Every break from a familiar brand is a barrier to busting down an old habit.

So, how many habits are you willing to change while visiting your local market, huh? I’m going to bend my mind a lot in the coming weeks.