Plastic Bag Marketing »
I don't know if anyone else notices, but at least two companies - Home Depot and Wal-Mart - established a sort of branding with their plastic shopping bags. You know, those cheap ones into which your stuff goes when you visit the checkout counter.
Home Depot's have always (at least in recent memory) been a sort of brownish color. I think orange might be better, but perhaps the added expense isn't worth it. Wal-Mart's have always (again, in recent memory) been blue.
So I went to Wal-Mart yesterday and it took me until I was back in the car before I noticed that their bags had changed! They are now white, which as you may know is probably the most common color for this sort of bag, providing no differentiation at all.
Now it's entirely possible that these companies never looked at their plastic bags as advertisment in the first place. But if that's the case, why did they ever color them, much less put their names across the bags? No, I think they are an advertising tool.
We can look at our collection of saved bags and tell where we've been recently - an overwhelming amount of blue would mean we had been to Wal-Mart far too often, while a lot of brown would say that we had been engaged on many home projects. The bags could also serve as a reminder of needing to return to make yet another purchase.
So assuming these are advertising tools, why did Wal-Mart switch? Perhaps they want Wal-Mart to be associated with the generic bag market - figuring that if they associate white with Wal-Mart, they'll see way more people thinking Wal-Mart when they see white bags. I don't think that will work. They won't stand out any longer.
Maybe the motivation was instead due to cost. I have no idea of the cost of producing blug bags, but I can see that if it costs one hundred thousandth of a cent less to product the white bags, a giant like Wal-Mart will save millions.
Is it worth the trade off? Dunno. Maybe I'm the only one who ever notices things like this. But if Wal-Mart starts losing sales, you heard it here first.
