What do you think people would buy if everything in grocery stores was packaged the exact same?

>>for what purpose

Well, the can has to be filled with something otherwise it wouldn't sterilize properly during the canning process. The label is telling you what that filling is so that you're informed. Other foods might be canned in water, syrup, stock, or oil, etc.

why are bongs so basic?

You would have loved living in the Eastern bloc

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>vegetables have Dole and Green Giant stickers
k

Buying things like oil or flour without a package sounds like a really good idea.

Both are sold in bulk at markets near me. In the case of olive oil the place imports it themselves, so it's much better than any crap you get at the supermarket.

The fun part is driving back home holding the oil in your hands while trying to not get it everywhere. If you take the bus back or get a friend to drive you it isn't nearly as fun.

just move to a controlled economy like Venezuela to enjoy zero branded stuff

I would buy the exact same shit because I always go to the store with a list and rarely buy anything not on that list.

Well clearly there are exceptions--some products must be bought in containers.

But that said, really good vendors of bulk goods will weigh it out (or measure it out if sold by volume) when you buy it. Same with spices. If you want shit you go to the supermarket isle and you buy the pre-bottled stuff. If you want good spices you go to a specialist vendor and order by weight: "I'd like 4 ounces of the Indian cumin, please"

Not everyone either lives in A.) an overpriced rich enclave with a spice shop out of all things in business or B.) some third world shithole with spices actually sold like that.

Supermarket spices are fine, you autist. Just maybe dodge McCormick.

Really? All you can conceive of for bulk spices are either specialty shops targeted at the wealthy and third world shitholes for buying bulk spices? There are no Middle Eastern or South Asian stores near you? A middle class person's only option for spices where you live is the supermarket?

I'm having a tough time believing that, but it makes me really grateful I don't live there.

>Real food
All food is real food

The idea of foodlike substances being passed off as actual food is nothing new. Most of what's sold in the supermarket qualifies once you get away from the produce and meat counters.

Depends, there are packages you can see through like bacon and I would still pick the nice looking bacon
If it's something frivolous like chips I would probably buy a cheaper brand tho, I sure as hell wouldn't buy the one expensive useless thing I always pick up

This. Not to mention there's always mail-order. I buy my spices from spicehouse.com. The cost per unit weight is actually cheaper than even the McCormick stuff, and the quality is much better.

What will your next post say? Are you going to point out that all food is organic because it contains carbon atoms?

Actually at least chicken does and you should keep am eye on the chicken brand because some can be really awful

After the price, I usually just look at the the nutrition info, the best before date, and sometimes the "product of country" stamp.

Couldn't really care less how colourful the logos are.

You could be subconsciously picking the products with the prettiest packaging and not realise.

I'm not a big believer in psychology.

That doesn't make you immune to branding and advertising.

>skim milk
You disgust me

Can you at least pretend your stupid ass isn't samefagging

>I know better than multi-billion dollar industires

I don't have to be immune to things that don't exist.

>I don't know how to tell when someone ios samefagging
Advertising exists, and it works.

Just because you don't believe in it doesn't mean that those things aren't real.

It exists to make people aware of products.

Every supermarket has a "basics" own-brand line that's cheap as shit, in addition to all the usual brand name stuff.

It's just an option for students and poor folk, but most of it is almost as good as brand names.

It exists to make people feel positively disposed toward products, making them more likely to purchase them.

If you say so, but I'm pretty confident no amount of subliminal messaging is going to make me purchase one of these piles of grease.

It could be that the average person is more impulsive than I am, but I'm just as inclined to believe that all of this subconscious stuff is baloney.

Footnote: Most of it, with the exception of alcohol. Basics alcohol is garbage without exception.

Fun little fact about store brand soda: they're all made by the same company, Cott.

I know this because I work in a factory that makes soda cans for just about half of North America.

what do you do there? just sit around in case one of the robots malfunctions?

you know there exists a middle ground between "complete bullshit" and "complete mind control", right?

ohhhh... that's gotta be righteous

i prefer yard bird

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>Are you going to point out that all food is organic because it contains carbon atoms?
kek

I think it bears to examine canned sardines

I think there can be genuine differences in quality between the oceans of origin and where they're processed

What is the middle ground? It's only sort of bullshit?

Mostly ground beef and chicken breast.

Every idiot thinks they're immune to branding and packaging, every one of these idiots is wrong.
t. marketingfag

this, with some exceptions like butter, flour, rice, etc

Any dirty tricks of the trade you could air out for us?

Is organ meat always organic?

Like most things, yeah...

What are you doing to improve the situation and make packaging that is less mind-controlly marketingfag?

When supermarkets make these distributor brand products, they almost always outsource the production, often to the regular brand. Or they try to have not too shitty products, cutting prices with large quantity rather than quality.

I got a question markettingfag.

You got a client comes to you with their product and its shit product, its low tier flavor, does packaging change the perception of the quality of the product that much?

Why WOULD he?

If they stopped needing dedicated marketing labor, the nigga would be out of a job

>buying unlabeled imported olive oil

top fucking kek enjoy your turkish mafia shit oil

>Middle Eastern or South Asian stores
I'm not going into the fucking ghettos just to buy my spices.

President's Choice :)

Same in the US with pretty much every major grocery chain.

>Real food

no name brand is generally pretty shit

Well, the big thing to watch out for is meaningless buzzwords. In general there's a lot of gray area where there can be obvious implications that aren't explicit statements and therefore not lying.

In general the only thing I'd really recommend is to buy things by weight to avoid slack fill and make sure any sort of adjective has a legal definition (things such as "premium" generally do not) before you let it influence purchase decisions. Also don't buy Italian olive oil, seriously.

Nothing? We just respond to trends and basic psychology. If "gluten free" becomes the new retarded fad then we're going to plaster it on fucking everything. I do kind of feel bad for people who legitimately have gluten allergies and the like since the retards who think gluten is poison drives the prices of gluten-free food up.
Really just do your research on anything you buy, if everyone did this there wouldn't be so much exploitation of stupidity.

Easily; you know the expression "eat with your eyes?"; that does have merit to it; presentation is a very important part of food in general and easily applies to packaging, I could go on more about this but I'll just be repeating myself. Elaborating on my original point, some people may be more wary and not fall for the more obvious tricks, however even certain colors will subconsciously affect your purchasing habits and overall perception of the product.

For the more adamant of consumers we also have this issue of cognitive dissonance where if they don't like a particular brand and try a quality product from it, they'll go out of their way to convince themselves they dislike it even though they would otherwise like it if they thought it was from a different brand.

>For the more adamant of consumers we also have this issue of cognitive dissonance where if they don't like a particular brand and try a quality product from it, they'll go out of their way to convince themselves they dislike it even though they would otherwise like it if they thought it was from a different brand.
The inverse is also true. Anyway I'm just giving extremely basic explanations, the psychology aspect of marketing gets VERY interesting when you go deeper and this is one of the reasons I chose the field.

when will Canada's No Name (or something similar) come to the US
I want it to penetrate my tight, quivering virgin market with cheap quality products

>cheap, quality
I forgot a comma right where it really counts

I drink therefore I am

Nothing surprising but very interesting. Thank you.

>Easily; you know the expression "eat with your eyes?"; that does have merit to it; presentation is a very important part of food in general
This only works once. Now that I know I like sushi of basically any kind it makes no difference to me if it looks like shit or it looks like it came out of a 5 star restaurant; I know I'm going to like it when I put it in my mouth.

Same shit applies to packaged goods.

I asked that question because I worked at a big name distribution company for beverages. They had new shit coming out all the time, problem is, most of the new shit is low on flavor, if you were to do blind taste test I'd say it tasted generic most of the time, but packaging was awesome.

One day I walk in the office, plant manager is there, secretary and someone else, we got this new tea product in a box for "taste test".

I tried it, tastes pretty generic, you can almost taste the ingredients one by one. Water, then the sweetner, then the tea flavoring, It's a tea like product to put it midly.

Plant manager thought it was fine, secretary been there for so long she's drank the kool aid everything the company puts out is great. Then it goes on the shelf and its priced at the same price as all other single serve bottles. Which for the quality that it was, its outrageous IMO

So many of the products we put out there are basically the same flavor in different packages, some are almost undrinkable, but people buy the shit out of them, I even see threads on Veeky Forums about some of these products and how much they love them

Sports drinks with electrolytes, same beverage as enhanced water drinks but without as much salt or sweetners, but you couldn't convince the public of that. But hey at the end of the day, the costumer chooses and we all got jobs I guess.

Lipton Iced Tea In glass bottles, is in my opinion, the best sweet tea you can buy in a bottle.

You can't beat 100%

>This only works once.

I used to think that way, but you'd be surprised how brand loyal people actually are, they will try the new shit because its "new version" of the same product they already drink. Think Mountain Dew Baja or Mountain Dew Code Red or other BS flavors they put out. Only reason why they sold the first bottle to begin with is because it was Mountain Dew, even though in reality it had nothing to do with Mountain Dew. It's like anything else, if you come up with a new product it doesn't matter if it is good or not if you give it a familiar name to piggy back from. Frito Lay is a good example for this, their seasonal odd ball flavored chips, if they were to launch those, as a product by themselves they would have sat on the shelf until they went out of date, but they don't because its Lays, they have that brand behind the shitty flavor to piggy back from. So even if the product is shit, it will sell, and sometimes it will sell more than once.

>eating real food
>not eating Real Food

>they have that brand behind the shitty flavor

What if they actually taste good to some people?

Sales go up, product becomes part of the flavor line up.

I mean in general. Why do you say Lays makes bad chips? Or that other Mountain Dew flavours are BS?

I've never tried Mountain Dew, but the ingredients seem to be different, so I can only imagine they taste a little different. Unless it's all an elaborate social experiment.

Lays doesn't make bad chips, their normal flavor line up is good. But their season stuff is pretty bad, I bought a bag of their capuccino chips over 15 people at my place of work tried them not one person liked it. Frito lay is a huge company they control over half of the chip market and aisle. They also have products out there without frito or lays in the bags just like Coke and Pepsi have beverages out there that don't say Coke or Pepsi anywhere on the bottle.

Had they launched cappuccino chips as a stand alone product without frito lay name on it. It would have been gathering dust, was it a strategic decision was it a gamble? I really don't know, these companies pull decisions that make you scratch your head, but that is also why we have markets I mean just because they didnt sell in my neck of the woods, doesn't mean they didn't sell out in Seattle. Things like that can be a hit or a miss. But the general impression I get being in this business for a while is that a lot of products simply would not sell without a bigger better brand name to piggy back from.

As far as the Mountain Dew that's just a example, would it have sold as good if it wasn't part of the Mountain Dew line up? I highly doubt it.

I have never felt the urge to use a fedora tipping reaction image, and I don't even have any, but fuck most of this thread

>Lipton Iced Tea In glass bottles, is in my opinion, the best sweet tea you can buy in a bottle.

really wish u could have put that at the beginning so i didnt waste my time reading your post

Like I said that is my opinion, I haven't seen it for sale in a few years. Which kind of bottled iced tea do you like user?

Why not just buy mince and make the burgers yourself from scratch?

That would be more work, and not much cheaper (if at all).

>every one of these idiots is wrong
Clearly you've never pinched pennies. Every single thing that I can buy store brand, I buy store brand.

I'm even rocking that best friend's high school wardrobe that he doesn't fit into anymore look. Several washes later, and the pants still smell like a moldy closet. Try me.

You realize that just because you, someone with a strong opinion and tastes, isn't tricked by it, doesn't mean it's nonexistent, right?

Do you think that lotteries don't make any money and are a waste of their creator's time just because you don't enter them?

How can food be real if our mouths aren't real?

I'm immune to food branding and marketing, too. If there's something I need, I do a cost analysis of it by weight or volume, then buy one of every kind that passes this first test. Then I do a personal quality test and between those two, decide what brand of said food item I buy regularly. Store brands usually win both tests. Occasionally a sale puts a different brand at the top of the list. I buy that brand that time, then revert to the quality/price winner the next trip.

I do agree that most people are susceptible to some level of psychological manipulation in their shopping habits.

>I do agree that most people are susceptible to some level of psychological manipulation in their shopping habits.

For example?

I been noticing this unwillingness/inability of understanding things from the point of view of others, more lately. Is this a generational gap or is it literally autism?

Like when people always buy the same brand out of loyalty even when a competing brand (which is essentially the same damn thing) is on sale that week for 2/3's the price of their favorite.

I do this one with my friends and family sometimes: Say they have a very popular brand of something in their fridge or pantry. Every time I go over, they always have that one. I'll say, hey you know XXX is actually a better price and seems higher quality to me, be it ice cream, coffee, whatever. I bring some over, and a lot of times they agree with me and they have a holy shit moment. Half the time they continue to buy their original favorite product. When I ask why, they always say something like: "I dunno." or "I just like it better". I believe this unknown factor is branding and marketing. I get it, packaging can be pretty. Advertisements can be memorable. They don't affect my decisions at the store, but they certainly do for a lot of people.

/r/ Ikea food product packaging