In response to Andrew's "Branding and the dangers bad quality."

I too am a loyal customer of Old Spice deoderant. Lately I have been noticing that their look has been changing quite a bit. You ask if I think it is smart of them that they are changing the look of their product line so often. Well I think that for Old Spice, they are okay. Most people that are loyal to old spice are going after the product and I'm sure that most of them don't care about what their deoderant stick looks like. I don't care if they change it every day, I would care if they changed their deoderant in some way.
     I can see some people getting turned off by product differentiation because it IS change. There are some people out there that don't deal well with change. People are creatures of habit and they don't like anything that means that they have to change something.

Brand loyalty or Routine?

     The article that I read talks about brand loyalty. This article talks abouthow people are more use to brand routine. For example, When you go grocery shopping and you buy the same cooking oil, this is brand routine. You stick with that type of cooking oil because it is part of your routine. So in order for you to change to a different brand of cooking oil, something needs to happen. Such as they don't have any in stock that day, this means that you need to select a different type of cookingoil and you mayor amy not like it. This will cause you to change brands to go back to your routine brand.
     I agree with this; I can see the points that this article was making but i do believe in brand loyalty. This article says that brand loyalty only works when that are two or more competitors such as coke and pepsi. For example, Google doesn't really have any huge competitors so there is no such things as being brand loyal to Google. My example is that I am loyal to Carhartt clothing because I like the way they fit and I think that the quality is really good. This is brand loyalty because Carhartt has a lot of competitors in the work wear line up.

Do you believe in brand loyalty? If so, can you give your example?

A Brand Makes a Promise

When people become loyal to a brand, it is because of somehting that makes them believe this brand is better then competing brands. This article says that there are three major categries for brands are quality, service or price. Most brands make a promise to their customers in one of these three articles. For example, I like Carhartt clothing because it is quality clothing and every time I need to buy new work cloths, I go to Carhartt because their quality to me is better than their competitors.
     Another example is that Walmart is known for prices, that is why people are loyal to Walmart and continue to go back their everytime they need something. The article gives the example of when Coke put out their "new" coke. People pushed it away because their were loyal to the origonal Coke and wondered what was wrong with the Coke they make now. This didn't go over well because people were loyal to the quality of the origonal Coke.