How about Target department stores? My impression is that they were your typical, budget brand, similar to K-mart, until about the 1990’s. Then they started selling “nicer” stuff and they seemed to be more upscale than K-mart and Walmart.
Some examples of what sets Target apart: stylish home stuff, including furniture. Special lego sets available only in Target. (Probably clothing is the real biggie here, but I know nothing about clothes.)
It’s possible that some of this predates my awareness of Target, but I thought they were always going for the “a little nicer than k-mart, but not too much nicer” niche.
I shop at Target a lot just because they’re very close to my house. One thing that I’ve noticed is that they change the name of their store brand from time to time. It used to be that they used the brand Market Pantry for more basic items and Archer Farms for higher end stuff. Then they added the brand Up & Up for household goods, but kept the other two for food items. Then they added the brand Simply Balanced for organic products, and it seems like they started to phase out the Archer Farms brand after that. Then last year they changed the brand on most of the household goods to Smartly, and rebranded all the food products to Good & Gather.
I always wondered if they did that to make the products seem more upscale. Like people started to realize Archer Farms was a store brand, and thus a “lesser” brand. So they rename it Good & Gather, and people might not realize right away that it’s just the same stuff that used to be branded Market Pantry/Archer Farms/Simply Balanced, and think of it as more upscale.
Back in the '50s and '60s, anything labeled “Made in Japan” used to mean it was a total piece of crap.
But it’s a myth that the Japanese labeled products “Made in USA” as an attempt to get around this. There is an actual town of “Usa” in Japan.
Also in the same vein, I’ve heard St. Pauli Girl was created to appeal to American tastes, and is considered crap beer in Germany (it’s still a hell of a lot better than mass-produced American lagers).
And Pabst Blue Ribbon got a popularity boost in the early 2000s due to hipsters deciding to make it their drink of choice, though I don’t think it had anything to do with marketing efforts on the part of the Pabst Brewinc Co., just dumb luck.
Around here, the major grocery chain is Price Chopper. They’re in the process of upgrading their brand to Market 32 to sound more upscale. Currently, they’re using both names side-by-side, but the clear intention is to eventually be Market 32.
(“32” refers to the year they established. Their symbol used to be a Liberty dollar with that date being chopped with an axe, but they dropped that when people complained it looked like the axe was chopping Miss Liberty),
Nonsense. Their reputation for the first decade at least was for quirky, extremely durable cars and they promoted that with TV commercials that touted their longevity. In the late 80s they introduced the “Justy.”
That particular model was a piece of crap.
That’s history repeating. When Germany became a new industrial power after the unification of 1871, the British forced imported German goods to be labelled “Made in Germany”. Of course, it soon became a sign for quality.
There are a lot of elite athletes who wear Adidas and Nike. I’d say they’re still serious athletic clothing.
Gallo wines were considered cheap and inferior to more upscale wines. Gallo Hearty Burgundy was the go-to red wine when I was in college.
They slowly moved from generic wines to varietals as more and more boutique wineries started opening. They rebranded themselves as E. and J. Gallo Wineries and Gallo Family Vineyards, and now concentrate on a more upscale image (though they still make the cheap stuff).
Yeah, they have a few brands.
Carhartt is kind of like that today. Their stuff still popular with contractors and labor types but also has some mass market appeal, especially jackets and things like carpenters’ pants.
You can even look at how some individual car models (like the Civic or the Corolla) changed over the decades they’ve been available. Both were small, inexpensive compact cars when they were first introduced in the US (perhaps aimed at the first-time car buyer) but have gradually gotten nicer over the years. And both Toyota and Honda now have cheaper models.
Cola’s can be considered premium??? I just wouldn’t stratify soft drinks along those lines.
Of course colas can be premium. Coke / Pepsi / Dr Pepper / etc - the name brand ones that advertise are premium-ish. There are also various micro-colas, like Jones Soda up here in the Seattle area, that advertise less-to-not-at-all, but use ‘premium ingredients’ (usually real sugar) and charge premium prices. These are really a tier up. Then there’s the various store brands and knock offs. These are several tiers down.
Fentimans Curiosity Cola would be an example of a premium cola.
I wouldn’t consider Coke or Pepsi “premuim”, more like mainstream/middle-of-the-road, but I think @RealityChuck meant that Pepsi is now considered to be on par with Coke, rather than a bargain priced alternative to it, on the level of today’s store brands.
Royal Crown Cola was never considered as prestigious (or tasty) as the obvious category leaders. My understanding is they manufacture many of the supermarket brands. However, they introduced the first diet cola in 1958 and supposedly deserve credit (I wasn’t there!) for marketing it with the goal of reducing both adult and paediatric obesity.