After the recent news reports around misleading packaging on supermarket’s own based products, ones that had a similarity with the more well-known brands. We carried out several surveys to investigate further to see what consumers thought about the packaging and labelling.
There has been a lot of talk recently that supermarket’s own brand packaging was far too similar to well-known brands, and that this could cause confusion to consumers and misleading them to buy, what they think is the more traditional brands.
Our surveys polled over 2,000 Britons, asking to voice their opinions on supermarket own brand compared to traditional brands. The survey results showed the supermarkets with the best own brand products, which five products consumers lean more towards and overall (own brand or branded), and if consumers buy own brand or branded goods on a whole.
The results of our survey are below:
Which supermarket own brands do you prefer?
- Aldi 23.9%
- Tesco 19.0%
- Asda 15.6%
- Sainsbury’s 14.8%
- Waitrose 12.0%
- Morrisons 8.6%
- Lidl 6.1%
Aldi took the top spot as the supermarket of choice for their own brand products for customers.
Do you buy brand names or supermarket own brands when shopping?
- Brand names 45%
- Supermarket own brands 55%
Surprisingly, people are more interested in supermarkets own brands and not the big brands we are bombarded with every day. This could either be a cost related approach, or people simply prefer the taste of supermarket’s own products.
In a bid to find out more, we thought we’d test out 5 own brand products against their branded equivalent, we asked:
Which products do you favour more?
- Activia 46.4% – Active 53.6%
- Pataks 41.9% – Madras 58.1%
- Lattice 36.6% – Aldi Lattice 63.4%
- Paxo 54.9% – Quixo 45.1%
- Beautifully Buttery 43.8% – Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter 56.2%
- Vita coco 48.7% – Coco loco 51.3%
In the scenarios of misleading packaging, it seems that consumers don’t get confused into buying the wrong product. The argument was suggesting that the packaging was so similar that consumers were buying own brand products thinking they were branded products, our survey found this to be false.
Most people can relate to different flavours that represent a colour, for example, ready salted crisps are red, and salt and vinegar flavours are blue. This doesn’t mean that big brands will only display these colours, supermarket own brands will showcase the colours that correspond towards the chosen flavour