The vast money that companies spend on establishing their brands really works. We come to believe that a certain brand is the gold standard and everything else falls in behind it, usable or edible perhaps, but simply not as good. More often than not this has nothing to do with our experience of the alternatives, but because that idea has been so effectively fixed in our minds.

I’m very, very fussy about sausages. I love Superquinn’s sausages and they’ve been one of the things that keep me going back there.

So for all the time I’ve been shopping in Lidl, two years and counting, I never even tried their Irish sausages. I just assumed they’d be awful. Until Saturday.

I bought 9 premium pork sausages, which are 86% pork, for €1.99. They were absolutely gorgeous. I’d go as far as saying they might even be nicer than Superquinn’s.

I feel like a complete idiot for not trying them before now, but I’m not alone.

Ireland: Officially Brand Addicted

A report published in 2007 confirmed what has long been known by marketers – that Irish consumers are far more loyal to brands than their counterparts in Europe, with well over half of shoppers sticking to the brands they know and not shopping around.

To put this in context, only 8% of Norwegians were found to stick consistently to known products.

It may not be the only reason, but there is some justification for the comment from the survey’s author that: “this loyalty may help to explain why Irish people pay higher grocery bills than their European neighbours, as branded products are not being replaced with cheaper alternatives.”

Change is happening already. For one thing the clear trend in the survey is that the younger the consumer the more fragile the brand loyalty. And of course the coming to the market of Lidl and Aldi has definitely caused a drift away from better known brands. But it’s still a slow change.

Try Something Different

The other day I watched two women in succession pause in front of a display of dishwasher tablets, consider their options, and choose a box of Finish All in One at €8.99 for 30 tablets over a box of Lidl’s own brand W5 Perfect 5 tabs at €4.29 for 10 tablets more.

Now I’ve been using the Lidl ones for a long time, as have many people I know, and they totally do the job and do it very well indeed. You could see the women struggle to believe this, perhaps even because of the huge price difference. It’s quite hard to believe that something costing about a third of the price could be anything like as good as something you just ‘know’ is the best.

But if you use your dishwasher once a day, making this simple switch could save you almost €70 in a year – just on washing up! It may not seem like a fortune, but repeat a similar saving with 3 more items and it would be the equivalent of about a 1% rise in take home pay for someone on the average industrial wage. As the old adage goes, a penny saved is a penny earned.

So, here is a challenge for you: this week step outside your comfort zone, jettison one of the brands you have steadfastly stuck to and buy a cheaper alternative, not necessarily in Lidl, anywhere you like.

Sure, it may be a disaster. On Saturday, as well as the sausages, I also tried Lidl’s Toppers Diet Coke and I won’t be doing that again. But there are bound to be some revelations also.

Come back and share your experience – pooling our knowledge will make cannier shoppers of us all.

Tags: Brands, Diswasher Tablets, Prices, Sausages
Posted in Wasting Money | 25 Comments »

I got a call during the week from Mark Paul, a journalist with the Sunday Times, who wanted to ask about why I’d largely deserted Superquinn and now do my main shop in Lidl. I would have thought the reason was pretty obvious, but was happy to expand on it for him.

His article, in today’s Business Section, uses me as an example of the sort of shopper Superquinn chairman Simon Burke needs to woo back if he is to “staunch the flow of shoppers” to cheaper rivals.

Maybe he’s right. I was once a slavishly devoted Superquinn shopper, even something of a Fergal groupie. I did all my shopping there and I’m ashamed to admit that I slightly looked down on those who I felt were willing to compromise on quality by shopping in ‘inferior’ places, even if it saved them a few quid.

My desertion of Superquinn was gradual but pretty much total. I still shop there from time to time, but never with a trolley – it’s a place for occasional top-ups if I happen to be passing.

I initially went to Lidl from curiosity but was perplexed by unfamiliar brands, even unfamiliar foods, and found the basic displays and the absence of the high level of service to which I was accustomed disconcerting. I was used to having someone fill my bags, to real butchers and the smell of fresh baked bread, to pretty displays and interesting specials.

But, you know, the stuff I bought in Lidl was pretty good in the main and there were a couple of things I really liked a lot and that I couldn’t get in Superquinn – JD Gross chocolate was the biggie for me. So I went back and kept on trying new things, but was still not doing my main shop there.

The turning point came one day in Superquinn when I just popped in for a few things and half way around looked into a basket that contained bacon, nuts, cheese and some veg and realised that by taking a short trip across town I could not only cut the price of that basket in half but do so without making any compromise on quality at all.

I had this very strong feeling of being taken for a ride. I abandoned the basket, got in the car and pretty much never looked back.

One quote from Simon Burke in the article stands out for me:

“People should feel that shopping in Superquinn is something stylish to do. There should be a feeling that it is a cut above the rest.”

If he wants to woo me and my like back he won’t do it with that thinking.

It’s amazing how quickly you acclimatise to a more basic shopping environment. Once you do it brings all those prettied up and stylish displays elsewhere into sharp focus, you start to see them for what they really are, pointless distractions designed to make you spend more and overlook high prices.

We are after all talking about grocery shopping here. It’s a necessary chore, not a style statement. If I want stylish I can take the €2000-€3000 per year I save by shopping cannily and go in search of it, but I won’t be looking in a supermarket.

Tags: Style, Superquinn
Posted in Shopping Baskets, Wasting Money | 14 Comments »

I am old enough to have sat laughing uproariously at the telly when Geoff Read appeared on the Late Late Show in 1984 talking about his plans to launch bottled water on the Irish market. I thought it was a hoot but obviously doomed to failure, which shows how much I know when it comes to predicting what the market wants.

Like everyone else watching I not only swallowed my words later but swallowed plenty of Ballygowan along with them.

I mention this because I was strolling through the minerals aisle of Superquinn last week when I saw a women pop four quite attractive looking bottles into her trolley. I had to have a look to see what they were and it turned out they were water.

Finé “natural artisan water” to be exact, all the way from Japan according to the label and costing €6.59 per 750cl.

While I reeled from the shock of this, my eyes wandered down to a locked glass case displaying bottles of Bling H2O, encrusted with Swarovski crystals and priced at an utterly mind boggling €44.99 for the same sized bottle.

What amazed me most though was that a perfectly sane looking woman in Kilkenny was casually buying this stuff. I asked some of the staff and it appears that Bling is selling quite well too, if not exactly walking off the shelves.

Now I absolutely realise this isn’t about water, in spite of the flowery talk of volcanic springs and health giving properties. It’s about what carrying one of these, admittedly attractive, bottles says about you.

I have to assume that those who buy them believe they will, as a result, be set apart from ordinary mortals and publicly recognised as having “exquisite taste”, because the Bling website tells us it is so. Or maybe they believe that flaunting their “gourmet” water shows that they are deeply concerned about their health or will pursue quality without regard to such trivialities as price.

I mean they can’t think that it marks them out as gullible deluded fools can they?

It easy to calculate the cost of these relative to ordinary water – you could buy 50 litres of water in Lidl for the same price as one litre of Finé, in the case of Bling you’d need a good sized trailer to take home your 370 litres.

When it comes to calculating other costs it’s not so easy. The discerning folk of exquisite taste who want everything to be natural and pure and high quality might take a moment to think about the environmental impact of getting heavy glass bottles of water from Japan and Tennessee to the shelves of an Irish supermarket, not to mention making them and transporting them for filling beforehand.

All I can say is that I hope that once they have acquired their fancy bottles they take real good care of them and refill them from Lidl, or better still from the tap.

Tags: Bling, Superquinn, Water
Posted in Wasting Money | 10 Comments »