It is Super Bowl Sunday and I am sure you are either going to watch the game, eat good food, do both, or do none of them. My wife and I are going to enjoy watching the game and eating good food. I am sure my son will enjoy it as well for however long he stays up. Since it is Sunday, I am bringing you this week’s Simple Savings Sunday tip. I am going to go pretty easy with this one. This week I am going to tell everyone to go generic when buying items. This is typically left for food and prescription items, but you can buy generic for a large group of items.
Brands Have You Hooked
The first thing I learned while getting my marketing degree is that brand loyalty is where the bread and butter is. If you can get people loyal to your brand, then you can control their purchase decisions. Ever since I learned this lesson, I always tried to look around at how brand loyal people are. Apple anyone? You have people standing in line for days just to get a new phone or product that Apple puts out. What irritates me is that Apple products cost so much, yet people pay it. That is brand loyalty and Apple thrives on it.
We have the assumption that anything with a brand that is well known must be good. If you put two items in front of someone and tell them to pick, they will go with the brand name a majority of the time. I blame it on the onslaught of advertising that we have in front of us. Brands pay a ton of money in order to get and stay in front of us. Why do you think it costs so much for us just to watch TV? How much of your favorite show is actually the show compared to commercials?
Generics Aren’t Bad
Generic products get a bad rap. When most people hear about the item being generic, they think that it is inferior. That is not always the case. There are many generic brands that taste or work just like the brand name items. You will see it time and time again, buy generic. Damn it, just buy generic!
Nine times out of ten, I purchase generic products. There have only bee a certain amount of times that I have found the brand to be far superior to the generic. Hell, when I was getting my degree, we had someone come in front one of the biggest food producers. He told us that they have contracts with many of the grocery stores and create their generic products. Most are the same products with just a slight change in mixture. That changed my view on brand name food items. You will almost never see me buy brand name items unless they are cheaper than the generics.
Don’t even get me started on generic prescription and non-prescription drugs. We all know that brand name drugs are super expensive, but generics are the exact same formulations. I will always get a generic if I can get it. I know that drug manufacturers pay a lot of money for research, but they pay way more for marketing. Marketing costs are the reason why brand name drugs are so expensive. It is the exact same thing with most brand name products. They pay for a lot of marketing, so it costs you more. The more marketing, the more money out of your wallet.
Think about it! Get your generic on…..
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