New Life – New Brands

When you are moving somewhere new there are a lot of new things to take in, new tax systems, new sides of escalators to stand at, new medical systems, new recycling systems. But the new things that create the most confusion in the beginning are all the new brands.

There is some sort of innate safety in brands, always buying the same washing powder, type of coffee or toilet paper. It’s because we know what they are, how they work and how they taste. We don’t have to think in the super market.
It’s also very hard to get people to change their purchases for certain products. I know for a fact that no matter what my parents say their coffee is not the best in the world. It’s the coffee they have almost always bought and they know it and they like it and they are not going to change.

Now, when you move to another country you need to find your brands again. I think this is why global marketing works so well, I might not know the local brands of toothpaste but I know Colgate. So I buy Colgate. I’ve used it before, I know they sell it in my home country; hence it can be that bad.

The issue I have here is with coffee, I’ve never seen any of these brands before really. I don’t know what they taste like and coffee is very important so you don’t want to buy something nasty. Which we have done since we got here. We bought something that tasted like chlorinated water, we bought another type that didn’t have any strength in it, we bought another type that was to strong. So finding the right type takes time. And it requires testing many different types. This is time consuming and expensive.

I suggest that someone should make a worldwide conversion chart for food.
Example:
Colgate – The same everywhere
Bla Mocca Coffee – not to dissimilar from M&S own brand dark roast – have yet to find a similar type in Oz.

And this list could be done for everything, everywhere and then you would easily know. So then you could concentrate your time and money on tasting and trying the specialities of that specific country. Which here means Vegemite and Tim Tams and then I could stop wasting time finding laundry detergent and toothpaste.