For example, clothing and cars are typically heavily branded. They typically have prominent displays of brands and consumers tend to have a high degree of brand awareness/loyalty for these items.
Other items, like houses and fresh produce, arent heavily branded. They dont prominently display their brands and consumers generally dont show much brand loyalty, or are even aware of what company built their house or grew their vegetables.
Why is this? What characteristics make a product susceptible to branding?
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I worked at the produce section in Costco and we would always be ordering from different brands for the same product – it all depended on who was able to supply the quantity we needed at the price we wanted. It’s a product that has a relatively short shelf-life, has inconsistent quality depending on the season and is susceptible to shortages thanks to uncooperative weather, so for both the store and the customers, it was very much “take what you can get”. If a you don’t like Kirkland toilet paper, you can just wait until Charmin toilet paper is available and buy a few month’s supply – but you can’t exactly do that with fresh lettuce. If you want to make a salad, you buy whatever’s at the store at most a few days in advance.
And for the most part, people judge produce by the produce itself. People will dig through a giant pallet of strawberries that all came in the same day from the same place and try to find that one container that’s absolutely perfect. It doesn’t matter what the label says, the only important thing is whether or not the strawberries themselves look good. For any brand, there’s bound to be some bruises, differences in size and ripeness, and the occasional rotting.
As far as housing goes, I think you’re more likely to notice branding in a brand new neighborhood when they’re trying to fill it up with new buildings, but I feel like they don’t want to be their name to be too prominent a few years later when houses start needing maintenance. I don’t mean to solely imply shoddy workmanship, but also these brands can’t really control what homeowners do in their houses or what contractors they hire after the fact. And if they branded your house like a giant billboard, I’m sure the first thing many people would do is get rid of the branding.
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