What brands do you associate with?
I guess loyalty to Brands is still a thing. I think younger generations might be falling away from that. Does the buck stop with Gen X, or do the older Millennials do brand loyalty now?
I don’t feel loyal to any brand anymore, but there are some name brands that I trust. It probably stems from my childhood. Plus, I am a little OCD, and I don’t like change in certain parts of my life. Sometimes I think this is why I hang on.
Quality might be another. But I wonder if even that’s there anymore. Some Brands, I see, got worse and stayed worse. And some got better and stayed better.
The thing is that trust has been dashed by the buying and selling of brands from one company to the other. Sometimes my heart breaks when I see what’s become as some brands from my youth.
Regardless, some of the brands I tend to stick to among the food line are Kraft, Nabisco, Keebler, Frito Lay, and Green Giant. Also Gerber. Of course that’s not necessarily a brand of food, but I tend to reach for it for baby showers, as well as Pampers. Are these products as good as they were when I was young? I think some of them are better, but I do not enjoy brands going from one place to the other. And how many Brands left the United States for other countries?…and they want my loyalty? I don’t like it when American brands are not made in the United states.
And then there are some things that I will not purchase. For instance I like fish – cod, perch, bass, catfish, whitefish. Also shrimp. I will not buy seafood from certain countries. I was certainly glad to see the day where the country of origin was forced to be placed on the package.
Anyway, I’ll leave those places nameless so that I do not offend anyone unintentionally.
Then there are the car brands. While I never considered myself having a favorite brand of car in my lifetime thus far, up until 2022 every single new car (5) and all used cars (5) – with the exception of one, were American brands, union made. And that’s always the way I liked it. But, last year I wanted to buy a new car, and wanted to get back into a sedan. I had a Jeep then.
I checked the American car brands and they did not, at that time, offer the sedan I imagined for myself. I looked and looked. The ones I liked best were way out of my price range. I cringed at the hought of a foreign car brand but felt I should do my research
I ended up with a Toyota – foreign, but assembled in the USA. I’ve never owned a car where the car maker originally started in another country.
I just don’t consider myself a brand loyalist for the most part. Sometimes I just buy what’s on sale. Sometimes I buy store brands. There is one exception. I prefer Kraft cheese. And it’s something I will buy nine times out of 10.
I also used to be a Sony loyalist. I remember my first Sony Walkman, purchased back in 1986-87! I remember holding that Walkman thinking: this is an excellently made product! And I continued to buy Sony’s on and off for decades. But even they’ve changed, I think.
The problem with brands is that they start out with the promises. Promises such as: I am made excellently! I will be here for you forever; you are what’s most important to me.
Then some huge corporation that owns many brands comes along and offers them a flat rate to buy them out. Sometimes because the product or recipe is excellent, and sometimes they just want the stamp out its popularity.
The most important factor should ot be whether the consumer is a brand loyalist, but whether the brand should be a consumer loyalist. I mean, look what happened to Twitter! Yes, it happens there too. Twitter failed its users. And the people who sold that social media product should be ashamed.
WANDA PARYLA 
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