> Last year, Unilever spent nearly $9.5 billion marketing its brands, including Dove, Lipton, Axe and Ben & Jerry's ice cream.
Holy cow, Ben & Jerry's ice cream, Dove soap, Lipton tea, and Axe fragrance are all brands owned by the same company?!
Holy cow, Ben & Jerry's ice cream, Dove soap, Lipton tea, and Axe fragrance are all brands owned by the same company?!
Now, in some places you can absolutely vote with your dollars, buying locally produced food and keeping the money circulating within your community and so forth. But that's also a bit of a luxury choice - you're willing to pay a bit more, and have the know-how to figure out the difference between a genuine small business that's doing right by its employees/the environment/whatever you care about, and a hip brand that is associated with those values but actually yet another front for a large corporate concern. Many people don't have those choices available (their only buying options maybe through superstores like Walmart or Dollar Tree), or lack the insight to see through the multiple layers of marketing and the economic pros and cons of our complex business infrastructure.
Unilever and other big conglomerates do actually put their logo on the products so if you pay careful attention you can see that information just by inspecting the packaging at the supermarket, but to most people that's just another certification stamp.
I still buy it, but I know to treat it like a commodity product and buy when the sale is good rather than a premium product that someone is actually taking pride in and might be worth the premium occasionally.
No that's not a typo, the number is around five hundred.
But that's called communism and is frowned upon in most capitalist growth-must-be-eternal countries.
Exactly. I can't think of a better example of this than Dove branding (love-your-body-in-any-shape-or-size feminism) compared to Axe (our deodorant will make hot chicks love you).
You can see some of this on display at
https://silk.com/our-story/history
https://silk.com/healthy-living/plant-based-diet
Notice the Danone link at the bottom of those pages (!!). (Americans will know their yogurt brand as "Dannon".)
Same with cars, buy a Bolt or a Prius and the money still goes to GM and Toyota. But the signal it sends is pretty clear (and it's clear car companies are seeing consumers voting with their wallets).
This is how it should work. We all want change to happen quickly and we want companies who suddenly (20 years ago, milk wasn't cruel) find themselves on the wrong side of morality to be punished. But it's more reasonable (and probably better) for this to happen gradually.
That some brands are less transparent than Bolt == GM, Prius == Toyota, doesn't seem materially relevant.
(I realize you weren't necessarily passing judgement, just some facts (which I didn't know!), so I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just injecting my opinion onto your facts).
It's interesting that you mention these 'greenwashing' marketing tactics as well, as I have never really drawn a line between these two phenomena. I am always surprised to hear how many very smart and un-naive people fall for transparent tricks like this. It seems that, like Harley stating that they don't sell motorcycles, they sell a lifestyle, these companies could be said to sell neo-liberalism along with their products. No need to worry about the fact that a system where corporations are destroying the planet might not be perfect, I bought from a company that donated $100k to save the Orangutans once etc.
Note also that the worshipping around Elon Musk is much the same thing, just for techies.
> Let’s turn to the high point of our consumerism. Let me take a drink.
> Starbucks coffee. I’m regularly drinking it, I must admit it. But are we aware, that when we buy a cappuccino from Starbucks, we also buy quite a lot of ideology? Which ideology?
> You know, when you enter a Starbucks store, it’s usually always displayed in some posters, their message, which is: “Yes, our cappuccino is more expensive than others,” but, then comes the story.
> “We give 1% all our income to some Guatemalan children to keep them healthy, for the water supply for some Saharan farmer, or to save the forest, to enable organic growing for coffee, or whatever or whatever.”
> Now, I admire the ingenuity of this solution. In the old days of pure, simple consumerism, you bough a product, and then you felt bad. “My God, I’m just a consumerist, while people are starving in Africa . . .”
> So the idea is that you had to do something to counteract your pure, destructive consumerism. For example, I don’t know, you contribute to charity and so on.
> What Starbucks enables you, is to be a consumerist, without any bad conscience, because the price for the countermeasure, for fighting consumerism, is already included into the price of a commodity. Like, you pay a little bit more, and you’re not just a consumerist, but you do also your duty towards the environment, the poor, starving people in Africa, and so on and so on.
> It’s, I think, the ultimate form of consumerism.
Huh, you mean Musk doesn't actually push R&D more than other car manufacturers / launch providers?
Its only natural those marketing tactics work. Who the hell does have the time to research environmental impact when buying a $4 brush. Don't forget to also research its durability, health impacts, social ethics, and so on. Apart from "evil" gov regulations, consumer organizations can help you to at least some degree. But i doubt that is enough for a good society.
And then looking at who owns all the huge companies: Vanguard, Wellington, BlackRock, State Street, Fidelity, etc.
Who owns BlackRock? PNC, Vanguard, State Street, Wellington, Fidelity, etc.
Who is this PNC? BlackRock, Vanguard, Fidelity, State Street, Wellington, etc.
It's just a big incestuous orgy of pension fund managers pretending to diversify and skimming a little off each trade.
This is gold.
But if I buy Fair Trade products, even if they're from Unilever/P&G/whatever, don't I still influence the way they are produced? Sure, Unilever would still be producing non-Fair Trade products, but only because other people are buying those.
The brand has to reflect the reality eventually; if Dove was being made in sweatshops (for example) that would be a news story sooner or later, in a way that it wouldn't for a brand that didn't have the same image. Likewise if you work for a company whose whole image is x, the easiest way to project it is simply to be x; it takes a lot more effort to fake a position you don't believe in than it does to simply believe that position. Even if the CEO is operating on pure cynicism, if the employees are constantly told that they're working for a company with strong ethical values they'll start to believe that and that will affect how they make decisions in their work.
I feel this is something like identity politics, and something that really does not need regulation except to allow those to identify however they wish, with no determent to others.
Corporations are made up of people, yes, but giving them personhood is a pretty dangerous idea. Should they get to vote? Obviously, the answer has to be "no" or else people will register companies to rig elections.
If they can't vote, are they really people?
If they aren't, then what exactly are felons and foreigners?
This logic is hugely flawed. Since we work off of a one-person-gets-one-ballot system, grouping people together (as in a corporation) and giving them a vote wouldn't make any sense. By contrast, you can't "use up" your speech rights: Each person is allowed an unlimited amount of legal speech, and I don't think there's a compelling philosophical argument that a group of people speaking together isn't protected. There may be _pragmatic_ arguments, but that's another ballgame altogether, since the entire point of the Constitution is that it's _not_ subject to the pragmatism/whims of the time.
I'm not saying that "corporations should be legally modeled as people" is an ironclad truth, but none of your objections make sense.
In reality, the argument is that you can't restrict a corporation's speech because using a corporation to speak is merely a form or method people use to speak.
You could speak via billboards, grass roots organizations, a radio show, lettets, or even a company you own.
The government can't curtail your speech no matter the method.
The people who comprise a group have no extra vote to give: if two friends and I form a group, a new vote allocated to the three of us doesn't magically materialize. By contrast, since there is no quota for speech per person, two friends and I can form a group (eg, an advocacy group) and tomorrow go down to Union Square (or buy airtime, or hand out pamphlets, or stand on a street corner) and engage in whatever legal speech we like, collectively. The claim is that if that group of people happens to be given the structure "corporation", that doesn't automatically allow for infringing on the rights of the people within the corporation to engage in legal speech.
Again, I'm making no statement as to whether I think this approach is wise or good for society or not, but it's astonishing how common it is to see people who completely don't know what they're talking about on this issue and yet are somehow super passionate about it.
Why shouldn't a corporation, effectively a person, use the vast wealth at it's disposal to influence elections and steer government policy in the direction it wants?
Hmmm, perhaps we should rethink this whole corporations as persons thing.
Banning the use of brands obviously won't achieve anything desirable, but requiring transparent branding seems like it will improve the consumer market's spending decisions.
Of course, pro-free-market legislation will never make it through Republican-controlled Congress...
IANANC but my understanding is that a true market is two-sided: it requires informed consumers. Initiatives that bolster the buyer-side of the market aren't anti-market.
Regulations that improve market efficiency are good. Regulations that impede efficiency are bad. In practice, we do need regulations because real-world actors are not optimal rational agents.
The most basic is the enforcement of contracts, which I think everyone agrees on.
But regulations about truth in advertising fit in there too. Lists of ingredients and nutritional information on packaging are an onerous regulation that allow consumers to make better informed choices (and so lead IMO to a "better" market). (I think brand ownership transparency is close philosophically to requiring ingredients on food products.) There are many examples of regulations that promote market efficiency, which sellers don't like because they may have been making profits from the inefficiency, or from information asymmetry.
There are of course regulations which degrade market efficiency too, either by regulatory capture or ill-thought out "consumer protection" like price controls, rent control, etc.
My overall point is that the assumption that a market with the fewest controls is de-facto the "best" market should be examined closely - manipulations of the market (whether by regulation, taxes, etc.) should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis based on whether they promote or degrade market efficiency.
In this case, the information is technically available but obscured such that consumers cannot make educated purchasing decisions without expending an irrational amount of time... thereby reducing supply-side competition.
Devil's advocate...
Brands can be a mnemonic that helps customers quickly recall relative quality experienced in previous purchases. This may vary across brands, and my experiences with Dove soap don't tell me anything about my experiences with Ben and Jerry's ice cream.
Brands are often silly and misleading and I try to avoid them, but they aren't inherently malicious by default.
Any medium that can manipulate can also inform.
I have some nasty reactions to the stuff and so did my late mother, who was a total skeptic to all crunchy-granola pure-foodery. I hate that they can brand a strange chemical like this with the names of natural sweeteners and then we're expected to call it by that name. Though I admit DichlorodideoxyβDfructofuranosyl4chloro4deoxyαDgalactopyranoside is much harder to say, and contains letters that aren't even letters at all.
Why would anyone buy bottled water when it comes practically free from the tap? Why would anyone buy bread that has had all the tasty goodness removed ('white bread')? Why would anyone buy branded toothpaste when the chemically-identical supermarket version is half the price? Why would anyone want roasted grain coated in sugar as the first thing you eat each day? Would anyone buy sugary water (a.k.a. pop) if they knew just how bad sugar is for them? Why would anyone want hydrogenated vegetable oil instead of butter?
Unilever can go hang.
Some reasons: immediacy, taste, convenience, quality, lack of price sensitivity.
> Why would anyone buy [prepackaged white bread]
Texture, goes stale slower than fresh baked bread, sizing, taste, convenience.
> Why would anyone buy [brand toothpaste vs store-brand toothpaste]
Taste, familiarity, trust.
Sure, bottled water tastes a little better than tap water, but I can’t help but cringe at the thought of 600 plastic bottles going into landfill. I avoid bottled water as much as possible, however when required I admit I do purchase 6 packs of 2L bottles for long road trips.
I guess it depends on where you live, but this is definitely not the case for me. And I live in a 111 year old building.
The BBC did a wonderfully subversive 3-part documentary a few years ago called "The foods that make billions", which investigates in some depth the way people's tastes have been shaped to accept anything the food industry comes up with (no matter how disgusting in concept). Well worth tracking down on YouTube or whatever (particularly the episode about yoghurt, which I found grimly hilarious).
> Taste, familiarity, trust.
That's the idea; familiarity and trust can be manufactured through advertising. You can become familiar with a brand name just by being exposed to it, and trust is harder but advertisers have it down to a science in some important ways.
You're in a place where tap water is not safe to drink and don't have a way to boil it. You live in a place where tap water is safe to drink, but tastes of sulfur. You're traveling and will want water in the next N hours. ...
Sure, there are many regions where potable water is difficult to attain, and there _are_ reasons to bottle water, but your contributions are disingenuously oblique.
Doesn't really matter, they are both manufactured and sold by the same company, at the same facility. The difference is just to provide the illusion of choice (and the price difference is usually much smaller, just enough to trigger a response in a certain common kind of consumer.)
Bottled water: Because you don't always have a tap on hand and you don't always bring a water bottle from home. Some regions doesn't have water that can be consumed directly from the tap for sanitary reasons.
Hydrogenated vegetable oil: Because of lactose intolerance, and because liquid vegetable oil wouldn't be useful in the situation.
IKR? The tub of Ben and Jerry's Chunky Monkey is right there! And you don't have to pour the milk!
A question I often ask myself because the tap water in my house is literally the stuff they put in the bottles (mountain spring fresh etc). And yet the entire family drinks bottled water hauled at great carbon footprint via Costco, probably bottled in California which is 1200 miles away.
My best answer is that if I were to lay down the law and mandate everyone turn on the tap to get their water[1], I'd be viewed as the cook tinfoil hat Dad everyone hates.
How the water-industrial-complex arranged for that to be the state of play is a very intriguing question I think.
[1]Sometimes people prefer bottled water to tap only because they store the bottles in the fridge. Cold water to some people tastes better, but if you ran a blind test where you took their tap water, put it in bottles and chilled them, they can't tell the difference. This does not explain things in my house however because the bottles are kept at room temp.
Maybe it's just a matter of rebranding yourself as the nature-loving, environmentally-conscious Dad who wants to keep the world plastic-free for your children :-)
https://crueltyfreeblog.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/foodmap....
But your point remains valid here. A small number of companies control a huge percentage of supply.
The funny thing is that they probably use the same manufacturers as the popular brands and just also a different label on it.
They absolutely do. For example, Costco has two Kirkland Signature vodkas. One of them is Grey Goose, and the other I forgot. Skyy? Same goes for their tequila, it's all Jose Cuervo.
The story goes that their biscuits are made in the same factory and cooked in the same batch as other brands, but M&S required that their biscuits be taken from the centre of the tray where they were cooked in the oven more evenly.
Depending on the store you get either mostly only store products (Aldi, Lidl), both store products and brand products (Kaufland, Rewe?) or mostly brand products (likely Edeka)
The case of what you mentioned is the reason why the Schwarz Group (Lidl and Kaufland) are moving overseas, respectively to the US and to Australia: there isn't much price competition.
Disclaimer: work for them.
And, obviously, within any one local market, there will be far more better-known regional brands, often not owned by any big corporation.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/craft-b...
It is inevitable that the global consumer goods industry consolidates into a handful of large groups as has happened, and the outcome is lower prices to consumers.
CPG companies are distribution and marketing powerhouses. They rose with supermarkets and mass media. The rise of voice-based ordering, as well as shops like Amazon, fundamentally threatens their business model.
Not totally sold on that part.
Unless, of course, the market turns into a monopoly. But even in oligopoly markets (such as the cola/soda) there is still plenty of choice, especially around lower cost products and with the rise of white-label/home-brand products.
You can also look at how much the large ones are buying local new brands (such as Blue Bottle). Tastes change, and small local companies are a great way for the big ones to figure out which new products work.
You'd be surprised how many "artisan", "organic", and "fair-trade" brands they own, too.
The full list of their brands did not fit in the main Wikipedia article, so they had to create a separate one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unilever_brands.
I get the quotes on "artisan," but why put them around two terms with very clear definitions?
Fair trade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_trade
Organic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_certification
To pretend they are very clear definitions when applied to products is wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nestl%C3%A9_brands
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Procter_%26_Gamble_bra...
(includes kraft + mondelez on the page)
> These are consumer goods products that sell quickly at relatively low cost – items such as milk, gum, fruit and vegetables, toilet paper, soda, beer and over-the-counter drugs like aspirin.
They've amassed their portfolio by slowly buying up local producers and their brands, and keeping the production facilities. There might be some synergy to be had by letting former separate production facilities learn from each other.
However, almost all of their products are sold in grocery stores, and there has to be enormous efficiencies there by newly acquired brands getting into a large existing distribution network. Instead of each product being distributed and marketed separately, Unilever can simply dump a couple of pallets of all their goods at once, and they can easily introduce new products by just dumping it on the grocery stores complete with marketing materials as part of a normal delivery.
Is that how it works? I always assumed grocery stores give shelf space to what they themselves pick, not "whatever you multinational corps want us to advertise today". (?)
When I used to live in Stockholm, my closest grocery store was one of the big two chains in Sweden, and they had "outsourced" part of their shelf re-stocking to the distributors, so if you went there in the mornings, you could have one or two people from a big bread producer/distributor restocking half the bread section, and you'd have someone from a different producer/distributor doing half the candy section (probably someone from Mondelez). I don't know this for sure, but I would bet that the distributor had a lot of leeway on how to restock the shelves using their own sales data.
Right now, my local Safeway has a bunch of shelves of deli products, but it's all Boar's Head products. Five bucks says that Boar's Head is choosing how to stock those shelves, and not Safeway. They also sometimes have a little floor display promoting new products from Boar's Head, that's also something that the local Safeway didn't do, they were just served up with some ready-to-go marketing, and they're okaying it.
If the grocery store is small, and Unilever, for example, is responsible for 10% of the inventory, but they're not happy with what the store is doing, it's probably really easy for them to say "Our delivery trucks only come every other week now, because you're not profitable enough. But, hey, if you let us decide what you should stock, the trucks will be there exactly when you need them."
https://www.vox.com/2016/11/22/13707022/grocery-store-slotti...
One of the most obvious places this happens is at Home Depot. The tools department is almost entirely manufacturer-rented. If you buy a drill or such and take it apart you'll find that the anti-theft magnetostrictive tag is actually inside the tool, not just stuck on the box!
https://assets.goodstatic.com/s3/magazine/assets/560378/orig...
Update: also very informative Banks Roadmap:
https://motherjones.com/files/images/big-bank-theory-chart-l...
less than $1 billion in research.
$13 billion in SG&A.