Brand Loyalty

 

We are all Goldilocks. Not in the way that we are a larcenous blond chick, but that we constantly are searching for what makes us comfortable. You know the fable, Goldilocks breaks into the Bears’ house, breaks Baby Bear’s chair, eats the family’s food and passes out in Mama Bear’s bed. Good thing the Bears caught her and ate her.

I’ve spent a lifetime trying to figure out the point of that story. Only when I reached middle age did it finally occur to me – finding a level of comfort is important enough to risk jail time to achieve. Well, maybe not jail time or getting eaten by bears, but it is important to have a certain level of comfort in life and as we age we tend to use the products that may not make us happy, but provides us with an acceptable level of luxury. Finding that comfort is easy now, we have all sorts of products available guaranteed to give is the kind of life to which we’ve become accustomed. So yeah, compared to our antecedents, we’ve got it easy. But the number of choices we have can be a burden in itself.

For instance, I’m trying out a new kind of soap right now. I bought a brick of eight bars because it was on sale, but it soon will be relegated to “back up soap,” which is only used when you’re out of your regular soap or when guests come over. Let your brother-in-law use the crappy soap. Am I right?

I’ve been pretty brand loyal to my regular soap – Dial Spring Water. It’s not too heavily scented, my skin likes it fine and the bar is shaped the right way. It checks off all my boxes when it comes to choosing a soap. You may have a different checklist and that is fine. This new bar, a coconut oil thing, is kind of oval shaped and hard to hold onto, especially as it shrinks. It also doesn’t produce enough suds for my satisfaction.

Even though I will continue to buy and use my regular soap, I do try out new kinds from time to time. For while I am brand loyal, neither Proctor & Gamble, Chattem nor Henkel cares much for me. It is fairly frequent that these companies will stop producing a product I use and like or they decide to change the formula and it just isn’t the same. I don’t blame them, you gotta sell your soap in a very competitive market and old guys like me are what is called a “niche market” and niche markets usually go away as the population ages.

P&G doesn’t care whether your favorite soap or toothpaste is taken off the shelves, they know you will pick another P&G product. No loss of customer. However, after a quick survey of the consumer products that I actually use, the only one manufactured by Proctor & Gamble is my deodorant. Still, the products I do use are manufactured by huge companies.

Growing up, our family bar of soap always was Kirk’s Original Coco Castile Soap. It was what my dad used and therefore, it was what the whole family used. We all had very dry skin because Kirk’s Original Coco Castile Soap is fucking harsh. Throughout my childhood, I had constant rashes. I’m not sure if the two things are related, but I stopped having rashes when I stopped using that wretched, burning soap. My dad, however, still loves it. He has brand loyalty, which is just a way to say that he is comfortable. That’s his soap and he will go to great lengths to assure that he has it.

It’s difficult to go to your local grocery store and find Kirk’s soap – it’s just not something that is often stocked unless there is some old guy who has browbeat a store manager to get it. I did notice, though, that it is sold regularly at any Cracker Barrel location.

Several years back my father bought enough soap online to last him for the rest of his life. At the time I laughed at him about that. Why not just change soap? I understand much better now that I have aged out of a coveted demographic. Products I’ve used and liked for 30 years are one by one disappearing from store shelves. When they do, I have to go searching for a new product. I’ve been through at least a dozen toothpaste brands in my lifetime. Sometimes the manufacturers will change the formula and keep the brand, or they will change the brand and keep the formula in a demented game of hide and seek that compels us to shop around for something suitable.

It’s annoying, but it didn’t really bother me much until Old Spice rebranded its whole line beginning in 2010. Old Spice had been around since 1938 and was strongly associated with “old men.” Obviously, no self-respecting “young man” wants to smell like their dad. There is some school of thought that says they actually should smell like their fathers, because young women will be attracted to the comforting scent of their own fathers. I don’t know that I buy that, but I’ve never had any complaints about the Old Spice I used most of my life.

Proctor & Gamble, which owns Old Spice, was losing market share to youth-oriented products like Axe and Dove for Men. The brand had to do something. The first step was a rebranding of its current line of products. Next was the introduction of new products. The final step was to ramp down production and elimination of underperforming products. It was time to get rid of the old men who used Old Spice and that left a lot of us guys without the personal care products we had used for so long.

I know it is easy for someone to say, “just find something new.” My own children laughed at my predicament. There is a problem with that. Toothpaste is easy to replace. Shampoos come and go. An anti-perspirant and deodorant is a different story, though. Everyone’s body has different balances and idiosyncrasies. I think it comes down to ph levels, but I’m really not sure what that means or how that works, and I’m too lazy to look it up. All I know it that Old Spice Original Classic Antiperspirant and Deodorant kept me dry and smelling fine. Its scent is subtle, which one commentator online said was a combination of citrus and wood. It wasn’t strong, but when I started sweating it kicked in well. (I have had more than one woman comment on that scent in appreciation.)

Old Spice stopped making it. When the tag on the supermarket shelf was removed and the product disappeared into the ether, I went about trying to find a replacement. Have you ever taken a good look at the deodorant aisle in the store? There are literally hundreds of products on the shelves. And, of course, even antiperspirant now has marketing attached to it. Instead of a simple name describing what something is, we are now offered products with names like Krakengard and Wolfthorn. What the hell does that mean? Will I smell like a dragon killer or like I was raised by wolves? I suppose that’s what P&G wants me to think.

In truth, I don’t care to smell like dragon killer, it doesn’t really fit my personality. In my youth, I played around with aftershaves and colognes, but never too long. (My experiment with some sort of musk-based cologne lasted exactly one evening.) It’s never good when you can’t stand your own scent. So when looking for a new deodorant, the first thing is to find something that doesn’t smell too objectionable. The second was it had to be a combination antiperspirant and deodorant. Usually, I give them about a week before giving up, unless I’ve feeling especially cheap and will use the whole stick.

During those times I kept wondering who with the stinky scent was in my vicinity only to realize it was me. Plus these possible replacements didn’t do much for the stickiness in my pits when I sweat. I’m not a heavy sweater from the pits to begin with, but I get an uncomfortable stickiness. It’s untenable.

After the line of little used deodorants began to line up on my bathroom shelf, I decided to take a page from my dad’s book and look online for the Old Spice Original Classic Antiperspirant and Deodorant. I found some and bought a year’s worth. When I ran out, I ordered another year supply. By that third year, the hoarded stock had finally run out and none was available anywhere, even Russia.

I was back to trying to find a replacement.

Then in a bit of serendipity, I found an 80^th Anniversary Special Edition of antiperspirant and deodorant. Old Spice had rebranded and repackaged my product. They also were charging $2 more per stick, but I didn’t care. They were only on shelves for a little bit, so now I’m back to buying my deodorant online.

I know that time is limited on my deodorant, though, and I’ll have to search for a replacement. Marketers lead you to believe that they are obsessed over brand loyalty, but they have learned that it’s only important in the short-term. Ford only wants you to buy a car this year, Colgate doesn’t care which brand of theirs you buy and Levi’s jeans gave up the loyalty of its customers when it closed all its plants in the US to make an inferior product somewhere else.

So, you will never see me wearing a T-shirt with a Nike swoosh and I find those who buy nothing but Apple products to be somewhat cultish. If these companies can’t be loyal to me, I can’t be loyal to them.

I’m just Goldilocks, after all, looking for the perfect chair to sit in, the perfect bowl of porridge to eat and the perfect bed in which to sleep. That’s where my loyalties lie.