{"id":332,"date":"2007-12-08T03:21:02","date_gmt":"2007-12-07T23:21:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=332"},"modified":"2007-12-08T03:21:02","modified_gmt":"2007-12-07T23:21:02","slug":"logos-please-and-more-of-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/332\/","title":{"rendered":"Logos please, and more of them"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first topic of this post could be viewed as a footnote to this post<\/a>,\u00a0in which I mourn the lack of a decent supermarket in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.\u00a0 Branded goods have come in for a lot of stick in the past few years, culminating in the book No <\/em>Logo, the author of which seems to think it would be better if the world’s consumables were not produced by large multinationals and carrying brand names.\u00a0 Critics of the book normally point to brands as being part of the system which guarantees, or at least attempts to uphold, the quality of a product.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk would be a good place to put the two opposing theories to test.\u00a0 Putting forth anecdotal evidence from my own experience, I have found that there are a few products in the supermarkets here\u00a0in addition to\u00a0the ones you would probably find on the moon, such as Coca-Cola.\u00a0 When I am hunting through rows of tins and jars bearing the names of mysterious Russian manufacturers such as Favourite Garden<\/em> or My Family<\/em>, I am drawn to the few international brands such as Parmalat, Heinz, Nestle,\u00a0and Green Giant<\/em>.\u00a0 Maybe there is a familiarity comfort factor at play here, but to be honest I’d never heard of Parmalat until they fell into financial trouble a few years back, and to my knowledge I’d never bought their products until I came here.\u00a0 So I’m thinking my preference of goods coming with a label I have heard of and have seen abroad is because I believe these brands carry a stronger guarantee of quality than the brands I have never heard of.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But that’s just me, and anecdotal evidence doesn’t say much.\u00a0 What does say a lot is the premium people are prepared to pay for the internationally branded goods, which is usually 30%-50% higher than the locally branded goods.\u00a0 If these items were to stay on the shelves for weeks, then it would be safe to say that the international brand is not worth premium being charged for it.\u00a0 But as things are, the internationally branded goods tend to disappear pretty quickly, which is clear evidence that people are willing to pay considerably more for internationally branded goods than products carrying an unfamiliar brand name.\u00a0 As an experiment, I’d like to see Naomi Klein put in a year in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk and inspect her shopping basket every time she buys in some groceries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first topic of this post could be viewed as a footnote to this post,\u00a0in which I mourn the lack of a decent supermarket in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.\u00a0 Branded goods have come in for a lot of stick in the past few … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,46],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=332"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}