Does store-brand packaging look bad on purpose?

In the grocery store, it’s usually easy to tell the difference between name-brand and store-brand products. Cereal boxes make a good example. Rice Krispies and Honey Nut Cheerios have beautiful, finely-tuned graphics, whereas store-brands like Crunchy Corn or whatever look pathetic.

I’m confused because it seems like just about any fool with a computer could design a better Crunchy Corn box. This leads me to suspect that they design crappy boxes on purpose in order to let consumers know that they’re the cheap alternative–so people looking for the cheap products can find them at a glace.

Any truth to this? Can any ad executives out there shed some light on this?

I am not an ad exec but essentially the box is doing its job. The appeal of the cheaper brands the cost, and if the box exemplifies the appeal then all the better. If a shopper is just glancing at the products available and can tell at a glance the more thrift option, then whatever they are doing is working.

Either that or one of the ways that they keep the costs down is by hiring cheap graphics designers.

I bet you it’s the latter. I’ve noticed that the store brand packaging for both Albertson’s and Target is exceptionally well designed, and they’re both stores that try to emphasize low costs.

After seeing the grubby package design, the first thing I look at is the little sticker on the shelf below the product that shows the “per ounce” or “per count” price so I can compare it with the prettier packaged item. If there’s a big difference, and if there’s water (or other liquid) involved in the packaging, I check the label to see percentages of liquid in each product. It’s quite often the case that all you’re saving on grubby packaging is packaging.

OTOH, there are store-brand items we actually prefer, such a Kroger egg nog. Beats the name brand stuff hands down. Breakfast cereals are another area. But the canned fruits, as a rule, are a ripoff unless you like lots of fruit-flavored water.

Let me emphatically say that, no, any fool probably couldn’t.

Branding and design and marketing are big big business, and like any other specialized field, it’s expensive to get good people and good product.

Another possible motive would be to avoid the perception that they are competing with the other brands. Obviously they are to a certain extent, but it could cause some ill will if they were making the name brands look bad.

On the other hand, some store brands are making much more of an effort now than they were back in the days of white or yellow boxes with black letters.

It’s definitely on purpose. These stores don’t want store brands to be in competition with national brands.

It all related to positioning.

However, research has shown that most profit is made when there are quality store brands, rather than low quality store brands. On the other hand, differentiation is the key; if you’re the only one with low cost store brands, you’ll win.

Refs for if you’re really interested:

Ailawadi, K.L. & Harlam, B. 2004. An Empirical Analysis of the Determinants of Retail Margins: The Role of Store-Brand Share. Journal of Marketing, 68 (1): 147 – 166

Ailawadi, K.L. 2001. The retail power-performance conundrum: What have we learned? Journal of Retailing, 77 (3): 299 – 319

Corstjens, M. & Lal, R. 2000. Building store loyalty through store brands. Journal of Marketing Research, 37 (3): 281 – 291

Cotterill, R.W., Putsis, W.P. & Dhar, R. 2000. Assessing the competitive interaction between private labels and national brands. Journal of Business, 73 (1): 109 – 138

Dick, A., Jain, A. & Richardson, P. 1995. Correlates of store brand proneness some empirical observations. Journal of Product and Brand Management, 4 (4): 15 – 22

Raju, J.S., Sethuraman, R. & Dhar, S.K. 1995b. The introduction and performance of store brands. Management Science, 41 (6): 957 – 979

Sayman, S., Hoch, S.J. & Raju, J. S. 2002. Positioning of store brands. Marketing Science, 21 (4): 378 – 397

I don’t know if I made any sense in that post above. Here are some ideas from the articles, that I have paraphrased.
[ul]
[li]Ailawadi et al. (2004) state that heavy users of store brands may be loyal to store brands, and therefore not as likely to become loyal to the store.[/li][li]Prior research has indicated that a sizeable segment of customers must be loyal to national brands for the introduction of a quality store brand to increase profit (Corstjens et al., 2000: 282). [/li][li]The stores must still sell national brands, because increase in profit will be partly due to the forced lowering of wholesale prices by manufacturers (Sayman, Hoch & Raju, 2002: 379). [/li][li]The literature stresses that a proportion of customers must be sensitive to product quality in order for the introduction of a quality store brand to increase profit levels (Corstjens & Lal, 2000). [/li]
[/ul]
To summarise, store brands should do well in relation to overall profit if they are positioned by quality rather than price. Likewise, store brands can make more money for the company if they primarily bring in light users of store brands.

(The referencing is screwy because I took the sentences from a proposal I prepared and the order of the sentences has changed.)

Sorry for the triple-post

As BurntSugar mentioned, there are two kinds of store brands. The very simple, generic looking stuff, and the expensive premium store brand. In Vons (Safeway elsewhere?), the premium is black and gold packaging. Back in my art school days, we learned that together those two colors make you think of luxury. It may be practically the same stuff as in the cheap store brand, but the package implies it’s better, so you’re willing to pay more.

The generic and/or poorly done store brand box appeals to those who plain out want the cheapest stuff, the package means little because they’ve got a tight budget. Why spend extra money printing a fancy label for someone who doesn’t care and might even pass it up because it doesn’t look like a real bargain?

Maybe not competing, but some stores definitely promote potential confusion between their brands and the name brands. By some stores I mean Kroger, although it wouldn’t surprise me if others do the same.

Case in point: I recently needed some allergy medicine. I’d never taken antihistamines before but had recently developed an allergy. So I go to the local Kroger-owned store, knowing they’d have a house brand that was cheaper than the name brand. And I also knew that the two packages would be hard to distinguish to the casual eye. The colors would be the same or nearly so, and the graphics on the package would be similar. The main difference would be that one has a well-known name brand and the other would not.

Sure enough, right next to Benadryl was the Kroger house brand looking exactly as I’d predicted. Kroger does this with lots of products: Crest toothpaste and Head & Shoulders shampoo, for examples, and many others. I can only assume that Kroger thinks they are so big that manufacturers can’t afford to alienate them with look-and-feel lawsuits. And they’re probably right.

One thing about the Kroger house-brand was the inverted pricing structure. They didn’t have the per-pill price on the shelf signs and probably for this reason. The 24 count package was priced at 8.3 cents/pill while the 100 count bottle was at 9.5 cents/pill. I had to do a bit of mental arithmetic to figure this out, something which most people wouldn’t do.

I wonder how much of the perception of quality has to do with the actual printing process as well, with regard to the quality of the cereal box and whether the various color processes are lined up correctly.

Come to think of it, we might also simply associate quality with “I recognize this cereal as popular and reliable because I recognize the sailor in the silly hat from TV, whereas this hyperglycemic squirrel on the cover of the off-brand just doesn’t ring any bells.”

It would also be interesting to see if the national brands were more likely (as I suspect they are) to carry national promotions you’ve heard of, or to have national campaigns like Sponge Bob Variety Pak Ryce Snak Treets™, or the Star Wars brand chocolate candy-coated crack, or the limited edition NBA collector’s can of limon-lem flavored carbonated beverage.

When I said that I was refering to the store brands with the awful packaging. Stores can (and do) use any weirdass marketing strategy they like, obviously, but the research shows introducing certain types of store brands in certain types of stores will garner the most profit for a company.

The OP’s question was basically “does the store-brand cereal box look crappy on purpose?”

The answer is, “to a large extent, yes.”

There are several reasons why. Many of them have already been discussed in this thread. To summarize:

  1. Less sophisticated graphic design. The Cheerios people have enough money to hire top designers and market research people to improve and update their already superior package design. Even an excellent designer can’t just come up with an equivalent package from scratch, especially if they are under time and budget constraints. And it’s probably not worth paying her to create a superior package, for reason 3, below.

  2. Cheaper printing. Cheerios can demand the best printing processes, the most consistent card stock, etc. The store brand probably has to make some compromises here to keep costs down, especially considering they aren’t able to get the kind of volume discounts Cheerios probably gets. And it’s not worth it for the store brand to pay for top printing, for reason 3, below.

  3. It’s in the store brand’s best interest to look a little worse than the name brand. As others in this thread have discussed, this works as a signal to the consumer that it’s a “value” brand. But by looking similar to the name brand, the customer knows that the product is supposed to be equivalent. In the past, there have been attempts to have completely no-frills packaging, but that backfired. The black letters on white packaging signalled not “value” but “cheapo,” regardless of the quality of the actual product inside. In most cases, it seems that the most successful package for a good quality but value-priced store brand is one that is somewhat similar to an equivalent national brand, but somewhat less sophisticated or attractive.

I have a box of Pathmark brand “Crispy Rice” on my kitchen counter right now. It uses roughly the same color palette as the Rice Krispies box, but its design is simpler and the card stock is also less shiny. It has an appealing picture of the cereal in a bowl with milk and berries, but it’s probably a little less appealing than whatever’s on the Rice Krispies box. They probably used a cheaper photographer and food stylist. And of course, there’s no Snap, Krackle, or Pop. The box intentionally signals “This product is very much like Rice Krispies, but cheaper.”