The Illusion of Variety in Consumer Products

As people walk up and down the isles at the store, they throw items into their carts - shampoo, bottled water, toothpaste, detergent - but how often do they stop and think: where did this item come from? Most people don't. I know I didn't. That was until I looked at a bottle of Lipton tea and realized that it was made by Unilever, a company I hadn't even heard of before. I got curious, and started to look at the labels of a lot of the household objects in my apartment and found that many of them were being produced from the same company.

It is interesting to notice that there are so few companies that make many of the major name brand products that we are familiar with. Take Proctor and Gamble, for example, or Unilever.

Proctor and Gamble produces all of the following name brand products:

Pantene
Herbal Essences
Aussie
Pert
Head and Shoulders
Ivory
Crest
Scope
Oral-B
Bounce
Cascade
Charmin
Comet
Dawn
Downy
Febreeze
Gain
Mr. Clean Tide
Swiffer
Joy
Puffs
Pringles
Covergirl
Tampax
Always
Gilette
Venus
Secret
Olay
Duracell
Eukanuba
Iams
Pampers
Vics
Ace

How many of these names is familiar to you? Did you know that they made all of these products, before you read this post? Although these are not all of the name brands that Proctor and Gamble produces (if you want to know more, they list all of their products on the Proctor and Gamble website) it covers a good majority of them.

So why is it large companies or corporations don't produce all of their products under their name? Its all one big magic trick. Its all about creating the illusion for consumers, that there is variety, and that they are in control. But this illusion, often covers the truth about a given product. The truth that consumers really don't have as much control about the products they buy as they think they do. The truth that the money you paid for the product is going to this huge corporation and not to a smaller business.

The illusion of variety is seen anywhere you shop, with all sorts of products, foodstuffs, clothing....just look around a little and you'll see that they have, really pulled the wool over our eyes in some ways, whether intentional or not.