Brands…A Shopper’s Little Helper

While watching Super Bowl 2015, we saw the first-ever ad for fresh produce. Avocados from Mexico ran a 60-second spot to tout their year-round availability, and encourage the purchase of more avocados.

My family is a fan of avocados, and my young daughters are already skilled at making guacamole. However, in all my times purchasing them, I have never noticed what brand I was buying. I think fruit and vegetable brands go largely unnoticed at the grocery store. We grab apples, potatoes and peppers from a bin, and bag them ourselves.

Now, compare that with the cereal aisle. It’s an explosion of brand names, logos, and mascots all shouting for our attention and purchase. In fact, during the average grocery store visit, we are exposed to more than 47,000 products. And according to AdWeek, we overwhelmingly prefer the grocery store to shopping online. We may never walk into a shoe store again (Thank you, Zappos!), but we’re still going to the grocery store.

That’s because we like the experience; and it allows us to check out packages, read labels and scan displays to help us make decisions. And the decisions are plentiful! This is where brand identity, brand awareness and brand connections are of colossal importance.  We use what we know, like, and feel about brands as the shortcut to decision making. And emotions weigh-in as the biggest driver.

Do you buy the same cereal or peanut butter for your kids that you ate as a child? The answer is probably yes, and that’s because food is emotional. We rationalize with facts and figures, but we make decisions from the heart (a.k.a. the limbic brain) and what “feels right.” To learn more about how brands tap into our emotions, see Rachel’s blog: Commercials and emotion: brands doing it right.