Enemies of Frugality, Part 1: Brand Loyalty
“Did that pumpkin cost twice as much as the other pumpkins?” - DavidDaddy1
Drastically cutting your monthly expenses takes sacrifice, perseverance and a small bit of insanity.
Today, we’ll begin examining the “insanity” portion of frugality with a series on the mental roadblocks you must overcome to save big bucks - i.e., The Enemies of Frugality (insert ominous music here).
The First Enemy of Frugality: Brand Loyalty.
I’ve never really thought of myself as a brand loyal person, yet I used to continually purchase the same brands at the grocery store and Target because they were “cheap enough” and I’d been satisfied with them in the past.
Take All laundry detergent, for instance. When I was in college, it was the lowest price brand that I’d actually seen others use, so I decided to try it. It worked, so I kept buying it, even though Purex was sometimes cheaper. For some reason, I thought Purex wasn’t a good brand - otherwise, why would Tide be so much more expensive? I eventually stopped even looking at the other brands, and purchased All exclusively for years.
In fact, I did this for many things: shampoo, deodorant, clothes… I would even buy the $16 razor replacement cartridges because they were the same brand as the razor I once bought on sale!
Needless to say, my brand loyalty was slowly costing me money.
Was it worth it? No, it usually was not.
The “cheap” Suave shampoo I used? It’s not nearly as nice as the Herbal Essences shampoo I often get for free after sales and coupons. And that Venus razor? Well, now I’ve got one of each kind of razor: Venus Breeze, Bic Soleil, Schick Intuitions, etc. I just buy whichever replacement cartridges I can get for free or next to free! (Or, sometimes I just buy another starter razor kit if it ends up being cheaper per razor!)
After trying so many different brands, I’ve learned that my brand loyalty was often misguided. And rarely worth the extra cost.
But if you just buy generics, none of this brand loyalty stuff applies, right?
I used to think the same way. In one of my early posts, Snowflaking: 100 Ways to Come Up With More Money for Your Debt Snowball, I wrote that you should only clip coupons for items you already use. My reasoning was that you should only buy it if you were already going to buy it anyway, and to buy generics for everything else. Well, I was most certainly WRONG!
Couponing and drug store shopping has opened my eyes to a lot of things: primarily, that I can get many name-brand items for much less than the price of generics, as long as I’m willing to sacrifice brand loyalty.
Which is not to say that I don’t still remain fairly loyal to a few brands. Coke, Puma and Banana Republic, for example. But my list has shrunk considerably, and my decision to stick with those brands is now a conscious choice instead of one made out of habit or convenience.
Likewise, I also have a list of brands I refuse to use - but my requirement is that I’ve tried them recently. For example, last week I added Mitchum antiperspirant to that list after sweating through work the first day I tried it - I wouldn’t buy that again even if it was free!
So the next time you go shopping, take note of which brands you are loyal to, and why. How much money could you save by “sacrificing” some of your loyalty?
(This post was included in the Carnival of Personal Finance, hosted by Greener Pastures.)
Photo Credit: True Brand Loyalty by unertlkm, used under Creative Commons licensing.
5 responses so far
I try to avoid this as much as possible, especially in the supermarket where own-brands are really the same as the big brands, just much cheaper. I haven’t got around it for clothes though unfortunately… just today I am tossing up between a pair of shoes from Ted Baker and a pair that are just the Debenhams own-brand (that are £55 cheaper). I just don’t know if i can do it! Nice site, btw
So true! Part of my challenge has been to convince the husband that we don’t need to be loyal to brands when there isn’t a difference in quality. Getting things for free or next-to-free has certainly helped change his mind. On the flip side, sometimes it IS important to pay more for quality. For example, I want a black cashmere turtleneck. However, there is a real difference between J. Crew and the store brand at Macy’s, so I plan to buy the better one, knowing that it will last for several more years.
This is so true. There are some things that I am still very Brand loyal on, so is my husband. One of them is deodorant. If it works well I don’t want to try something that doesn’t work as well. Another is shampoo. I love Tresemme. A $3 bottle will last over a month and i use the anit breakage which really works. My husband and I are trying to work on this, but as long as I can find sales on them I am happy.
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