MommyMandy

One of my sponsors for BlogHer 09 was www.Daymon.com. Daymon is a company I support and have for years but never knew it! They are trying to get out the word about PRIVATE BRANDS – also known as STORE brands or Private Label products. Daymon is a marketer not a supplier. In other words we connect suppliers to retailers and then help the retailers, like a Stater Brothers or a CVS or a Ralphs market their store brands.

With the recession and the now frugal spending habits of more and more consumers, we are seeing a trend towards what many in the media call a shift towards “conscientious consumption”, embracing a “thriftiness” focused on value and quality, not quantity.
They want to spread the word that Private Brands are not necessarily “below” average. They are no longer the generic store brands of your grandmother’s youth. In many cases they are as good as or better than the national brands – at often 20% below the cost of a national brand.

I wanted to share this post from Daymon:

I was driving over the weekend and an ad for Tylenol came on one of the all news/all talk radio stations. It was the voice of an actress making a “mom-like” plea for the national brand – very confident, kind of know-it-all, absolutely flawless inflection if you ask me (my mother never talked like that and she was absolutely perfect). I can’t recall the soliloquy verbatim, but it went something like: “Even though everyone is talking about store brands … Tylenol is my brand. It’s the brand I trust.” Again, don’t quote me on that but I know it’s close.

Anyway, I went to the radio station’s web site to see if I could track the ad but no deal. So I went to www.Tylenol..com to see if the maker McNeil had anything to say about a new campaign. There was no press release about any ad, but the home page text sort of mimicked the radio spot, and this IS exact: “Some store-brand pain relievers think if you compare their medicine to TYLENOL® you’ll buy the store brand. We think it depends on what you compare. Doctors recommend TYLENOL® more than all generic pain relievers combined. TYLENOL® works with your body in ways that have been trusted and proven for over 50 years. TYLENOL® does not make any generic or store-brand pain relievers.”

I’ll tell you, they do a lot of comparing between Tylenol and store brands, but they don’t say too much. For instance nowhere on the web site or in the radio ad did it say that Tylenol was better than store brand, or even any different than store brand. They never compared ingredients. And you better believe they never compared retail pricing. So I did all that.

On my way out of the movies on Saturday night I stopped in a Target store and visited the HBC aisle. I grabbed a package of 100ct Tylenol “rapid release gel caps” and exactly the same under the Target label. Every bit of the text on both boxes – right down to the commas and semicolons – was identical. Check this out:
“Drug facts: Active ingredients in each gel gap: acetaminophen
“Purpose: pain reliever/fever reducer”

The “pregnant and breast feeding” warning, and of course, my favorite: “Keep out of reach of children.”

About the only thing that was different from one package to the other was the price sticker: $5.79 for the Target brand and $7.99 for Tylenol. Same exact product, same exact ingredients. Same exact warnings. Same exact package text. I wonder why the radio ad and web site didn’t mention anything about the price.

Now, if you’re in the private brand business, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, because you know the FDA requires that all OTC meds contain exactly the same active ingredients. And you don’t mess with FDA. I’m betting that McNeil thinks the average consumer – the average mom – does not know about the FDA regulations, so why should they let the cat out of the bag. McNeil just has to make sure their Tylenol product is as good as the store brand. That’s all. The rest is called “spin.”

There are three things I hope you take away from this blog post:
1. The only difference between a national brand acetaminophen and a store brand acetaminophen is the price – the government says nothing else can be different.
2. The national brand advertisers have nothing bad to say about store brands, so they just “spin” the facts.
3. I have got to find something better to do on Saturday nights than reading labels in a Target store.

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