Red flag here for me.
I don’t doubt that the same factory that produces Oreos probably also produces (and maybe even bags) the generics, but you wouldn’t be able to see the line split would you?
Oreos have fancy embossing and “oreo” (or is it “Nabisco”) logos embossed and the generics have less fancy design.
I would think the real Oreos and the generics would have to be made on different shifts, wouldn’t they?
Laundry detergent bottles are getting bigger these days. And the companies can’t just say it’s a larger bottle, they stick on labels with things like “20 percent more free!” Since things that are free don’t cost anything, I don’t understand how a product can be more or less free. I either paid for it or I didn’t, and if I paid for it at all, it wasn’t free.
That’s the kind to use if you are amino hag. 
I still don’t know what Shea Butter is. Maybe it’s targeting Mets fans. Heeyyyy, butter, butter, butter! Swing!
If you look on the labels for Tylenol for migraines, for back pain, for sore muscles, for stubbed toe, for PMS, for long staff meetings, and extra strength, they are all exactly the same thing. :smack:
This is why I love ALDI.
So, no different from India Pale Ale, really.
If you’re going to stick it UP your ass, maybe you should try corncobs. Apparently they work very nicely.
I find that the Safeway Select products are usually better than the name brands. (They probably are the name brands, and I’m fooling myself that they taste better.)
A few months ago, I had occasion to buy some over-the-counter sleeping pills. Having never used them before, I looked over the information on each brand before purchasing one. Surprise! They all have the exact same active ingredient in the exact same doses. Doesn’t matter if it’s Sominex or Nytol or the generic store brand, they’re exactly the same. Only Sominex and Nytol charge you 3 or 4 dollars more so they can produce commercials telling you how superior their sleeping pills are. Guess what? I bought the store brand and I slept like a baby.
Great thread. I know I’ll be mocked, spurned and hated for this (probably even pitted)… but I just thought I’d clarify that whereas the thread refers to marketing, most of the posts so far concern only advertising and product packaging.
Marketing is any and all activity that seeks to optimise a company’s relationship with its chosen market. It covers a lot of stuff: doing surveys and gathering market intelligence, plotting seasonal trends and the company’s response to them, studying market sectors, planning and prepping new products, branding, designing, addressing the very complex issue of pricing and perceived value, testing market response and perceptions, trying to expand or improve production and distribution chains, trying to find an advantage over the other guy (a USP) and figuring out how long it’s going to remain an advantage, CRM (customer relationship management), and just plain, simple trying to come up with good ideas that the competition didn’t think of. And yes, somewhere in all that, there’s a lot of thought given to branding, packaging and then whether to advertise, how to advertise and in which media.
So advertising is part of marketing, but marketing covers a whole lot more. (Jeers and boos from the crowd) Look, it does say ‘fighting ignorance’, right? Someone somewhere might find this useful one day.
As for the OP, one good example is the advertising devoted to what we (UK) call petrol and my American friends call gas or gasoline. Stuff you pour into your car. It’s all the same stuff. It has to all be the same stuff or you couldn’t put it in cars. What’s more, almost everyone just buys gas at whichever station is nearest when they happen to be running low (sometimes you don’t get any choice). Yet every year the oil companies spend billions of dollars trying to develop some sort of brand loyalty.
The thing is, though, in some meds, there is a difference. In ritalin, I believe, the name brand and the generic have the same active ingredients, but use different binders. For some people that makes a huge difference.
I actually really enjoyed the first wave of those commercials… they started with the little kid seeing Grant Hill dunk a basketball and drink Sprite, so he drank some Sprite, tried to dunk a basketball, and failed miserably. I mean, sure, it’s still just an ad put together by big marketing firms to try to make us buy their product. But it never seemed to take itself too seriously, and made me laugh. What more do you want out of an ad?
Well, of course I know all about what you marketing folks do, it’s just that I’m too smart to be fooled by your crap. 
I buy a lot of no-name stuff, and switch brands like a drunken sailor if another brand is on sale. I don’t care about brand loyalty and am not an impulse shopper. I also rarely drink soft drinks or eat at fast food stores. (The kids convince me to take them to McDonald’s once in a while since they’re brainwashed by the “free” toy and the “delicious” meal.)
Yes, gas is another one of my pet peeves. Here, in Canada, we now have winter gas! :eek: What this undoubtedly means is that since ethanol is added to the gasoline anyway, someone thought “Hey! We can market this as winter gas, since it basically has a built-in antifreeze compound now! We’re fucking geniuses for coming up with the idea and the bleating sheep will buy it!”
And then there’s gas with “detergents” and “special formulations” for fuel injectors and the like.
Honestly, as a somewhat intelligent, and somewhat cynical consumer I am fed up with the whole roller coaster of new-and-improved products. Every once in a while something innovative gets invented and marketed. But for the most part it’s a waste of money. I’ll take the generic brand and save the advertising costs.
:rolleyes: Winter gas and summer gas have been around almost as long as cars. If you tried to run summer gas in the winter in Canuckistan, you would be in Rebok mode. Your car would not start. Summer gas is not volatile enough to allow your car to start at 0 and below. Likewise if you tried to run winter gas in the summer, you car would have a tendency to vapor lock.
Detergents are necessary to keep your injectors clean. Read the top tier link in my last post.
They change the formulation of gasoline for the season? I, I, I think I need a cite here. And yes, detergents may be necessary, but they all have the detergents. It’s not a differentiator; it’s a requirement.
Primarily, the refineries adjust the Reid Vapor Pressure (RVP) to help minimize smog production.
IIRC, Hersheys makes summer and winter chocolate, too. Less melty in the summer.
From gotpasswords cite
Any questions?
>Saw an ad on the tv last night for aerosal cleaner safe for self cleaning ovens.
>I must be pretty damn stupid, because I don’t see the problem with this.
I must be dumber than toast, then, because I’ve never cleaned our oven at all and nothing bad has happened. I don’t even know if the thing thinks it can clean itself. What are you guys talking about? What’s our motivation?
Actually this was a great idea that I don’t know why it took them as long as it did to figure it out. The damn silver can and silver boxes looked too much like Diet Coke and i was invariably picking up the wrong one. When they went to the black cans with the polar bear design for winter, it made too much sense. I was glad they stuck with it.
A few years ago, I was renting a house and apparently the leasing agency didn’t consider a deep cleaning between tenants to be necessary. This place had a strange oven - it had an element on both top and bottom (normal) and you could turn the bottom element to broil in addition to the top element (never seen that one before)
The first time I used the oven, I was trying to oven-fry some chicken. It cooked but didn’t brown, so I turned on the broiler, accidentally turning on the bottom broiler instead of the top one.
It turned out that the former tenant had spilled some sort of oil in the bottom of the oven. This oil caught fire shortly after the bottom broiler was turned on.
And this is why you sometimes need to clean your oven.