Rule Of Thumb For Consumer

I once knew a Jamaican gentleman who had a great pleasure of feeling superior to me because he used a Davidoff shower gel and I - some supermarket brand, with a very nice smell, but, well, nothing to feel high and mighty about.

Knowing marketing tricks helps understand that quality of life does not always increase with the amount of money invested. Reading labels, even without much scientific background, helps make rational choices, not influenced by advertising or social opinion.

All liquid cleaning products, from car shampoo and dishwashing detergent to upmarket brands of shower gels use one and only lathering agent - sodium laureth sulfate, SLS, a cheap and effective foamer. It is produced by submerging coconut shells discarded from palm oil production into sulphuric acid. It sounds scary but the final product, except for possible skin irritation from overuse, is harmless.

The point is that no matter what brand of shampoo or shower gel you buy, the major essential ingredients are the same - the SLS, some preserving and homogenizing agents, flavours may be different, but they do not add to the cost of production. When you buy a posh hand soap, 5 times the price of a house brand one, you pay for advertising expenditures and a higher profit mark-up for the producer. The increase in quality of your life is pure "placebic", a weeny ego-trip at the expense of a more economic shopper.

I was brought up in anti-consumerist society. The majority of products we used were basic and generic. When I moved abroad and found myself in a hyper-shopping paradise of Japan, I had to make a conscious effort to try and understand what is good and what is not, what makes sense and what doesn't when it comes to shopping. I had to analyse, compare and make conclusions because I had not grown up with shopping choices so I learnt to make better ones.

Later I got to observe the price-defining process from the inside, when I worked in a close conjunction with the Marketing Department in Bangkok. Marketing people are a smart lot. Their objective is a non-stop profit maximisation and they know exactly how put everything together and what subconscious buttons of yours to press to achieve it.

So, for myself, I figured a rule of thumb: go with the midrange. Cheap products are cheap for a reason, they use cheap ingredients and parts and are not meant to last. Upmarket products are mostly about hype and the conspicuous consumption kick. Top-end brands may offer exclusive quality -- hand-made, hard-to-find materials -- but that again is more about ego-stroking and less and less the case as, for example, high-market clothes producers switch from exclusive production by expert craftsmen to Asian and Central American sweatshops. Irresistibly attractive gadgets add to the price but not to your user experience. When you buy the latest and most expensive computer model, you pay for the R&D (research and development) expenses for the rest of the producer's range - a charitable and praiseworthy act, but I prefer to leave to commit it to somebody else.

The midrange can be tricky, too. It is important to understand up to what point you still pay for real quality, not for stretch limos, expensive whores and single malt whiskey for the manufacturer's top management. You also need to keep your eyes peeled for some trashy poor man's products - sometimes better repacked - priced as midrange, with no justification whatsoever. You just have to train your senses to see that very real quality - in the feel of the material, the dying pigment hue or in the fine print of technical specifications.

It is a jungle out there and the road through it is long and winding but it is also fun as long as you do not take everything too close to heart because, at the end of the day, it is all but maya and nothing matters but the joy you have and the experience you gain.