Do We Use Supermarket Brands To Express Social Class?

We all know brands help us to choose in a world of competing alternatives. When consumer goodsand services are largely the same, we have limited experience of a category or we are underpressure, we need heuristics - mental shortcuts for problem solving - and brands do the job. Butthere might also be other more sociological reasons beyond a guarantee of quality, authenticity orefficacy that motivate us to choose one brand over another.

I had a powerful brand experience under time pressure on Sunday that illustrates this point.

I live in the UK and am British by birth. I was driving down the motorway with my family and weneeded to stop and buy lunch for our hungry children. The nearest service station had a combinationof Marks and Spencer and Costa Coffee, and although this wasn't our first choice, we stopped andbought some perfectly nice sandwiches and snacks. Later on our journey, we passed the next servicestation that had a Waitrose and Starbucks combination. We were genuinely disappointed that wehadn't waited a little longer and shopped at Waitrose, and annoyed that we had allowed convenienceand (mild) distress to drive our choice.

This shocked me and I'm a little ashamed to admit it.

Firstly, there is no tangible difference between the ham and cheese sandwiches in each shop - interms of price, quality or ingredients. A blind taste test would make it impossible to differentiatebetween them. But we felt different about them and the feeling was visceral.

I joked that this was a classic bourgeois tragedy (not a joke that makes my wife laugh any longer).This started a conversation about supermarkets and social class. And that the brands we choose aresymbols for our class identifications or aspirations.

This reminded me of a great study by a Stanford University researcher about the use of class-drivenvisual and language cues to sell crisps to American consumers. They found that cheaper crispspromoted 'working class' values of economy, tradition and homeliness, whilst their more expensivecounterparts emphasize 'nature' and handmade processes to promote authentic middle class values.There is no real difference in the ingredients or healthiness of these options - and everyone eatscrisps regardless of social position - but we choose them based on deeply engrained classidentifications and their brand positioning reflects and exploits class divisions in culture.

In other words, the crisp brand you choose says something about your social status.

Another interesting article at the time, commented on the connection between this research and thesociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who was among the first to demonstrate the role of tastes in orderingrelations between different social groups through his concept of 'cultural capital'. In his famousstudy of French culture in the 1960s, he suggested that bourgeois (middle class) tastes - ineverything from food to fashion - were deliberately disconnected from utility. On the other hand, theworking classes preferred function to form and chose on the basis of necessity.

This is not necessarily a matter of what people can afford, or real differences of quality oreffectiveness, but rather the way we use symbols to express identity and reinforce social divisions.

So what does this mean for supermarket branding?

The UK grocery market is beginning to polarise around premium and discount supermarket brands.With Waitrose gaining market share in the former and Aldi and Lidl expanding rapidly in the latter -all at the expense of the traditional big four chains.

In tandem, there is a growing wealth gap between the richest and poorest in British society , whichis arguably reinforcing and intensifying existing class divisions. And this polarisation is alsohappening in the United States where some commentators argue the difference is more extremethan at any time since the Great Depression.

It is perhaps no coincidence that those supermarket brands enjoying the most growth in thecompetitive UK market are explicitly positioned to attend to Bourdieu's portrait of 'authentic' classvalues - a middle class interested in the nobility of gastronomy (Heston Blumenthal's Waitrose) and aworking class interested in the no-frills utility of everyday essentials (#LidlSuprises and Aldi'sAmazing Value). So if I identify myself as 'middle class' in British society today (whatever thatmeans), then Waitrose might be the only brand I feel safe liking - and the same might apply to thedifferent roles Walmart, Target and Whole Foods play in American cultural life.

Whatever the drivers of brand success, this is a powerful reminder that our brand choices might besymbolic of more powerful identifications and social structures outside our conscious control.Symbols that we use to express (and onto which we project) aspiration, identity and even differencefrom others - always an emotive and potentially dangerous issue.

So the next time you go shopping or tell someone which supermarket you prefer, take a moment toreflect on what you have chosen and why, and how this might reflect the class you want to be seento belong to. You might be surprised by how strongly you feel.

Not just that, but as we observe this growing polarisation in society - not just in the UK, but aroundthe world - what new pressures does this put on brands to adopt either a discount or premiumposition (with no more room for a middle ground) and how might this start to polarize othercategories, markets and consumption experiences as a result?

Social tagging: Branding > Business > Marketing > retail > Social Class > Society

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