Danger said:
Once I find a brand that I like (usually really inexpensive no-name stuff that's as good as the national brands), I just stick with it. I'm immune to ads.
I can hardly find my "regular" toothpaste amidst the whole aisle of toothpastes now! Part of the problem I run into is that I keep moving, so the generic brands are different from store to store and region to region. I can't just find one of those and stick with it (I've also run into times when the generic brand wasn't cheaper than the name brand...it was just more diluted so actually cost more, or when it was cheaper to buy small bottles or individual items rather than the bulk pack).
Then again, I'm still trying to figure out the craziness behind the grocery store's layout here. I hunted all over for breadcrumbs last week, and finally found them next to the bread. To me, breadcrumbs are a baking need and should be in the aisle with flour, spices and cooking oil. Then, they have an "ethnic foods" aisle, which includes Italian, and they put all the canned tomatoes in that aisle along with pasta...last I checked, canned tomatoes were a canned vegetable, and weren't exclusively consumed by Italians. And I think pasta and rice belong together, not separated by ethnicity. Oh, and the real fun one is that ethnic aisle has a "Mexican" food section (which is not just Mexican...the store manager needs a lesson on world cultures I think), and they put some of the canned beans there...the ones with Spanish-sounding brand names...and some of them in the canned vegetable aisle. Grrr. Yet, the beans with the Italian-sounding brand name were in the canned vegetable aisle, not the Italian foods section. Oh, and then the processed cheeses are over in the dairy case (near the yogurt and butter) all the way on the far side of the store, while the fancy, good cheeses (and some not-so-fancy ones...don't ask me, I'm not sure what divides them from the other cheeses) are in a case on the complete other side of the store near the produce and meats. I understand the reasoning of putting dairy at one end and produce and meats at the other...it forces the shopper to walk through the rest of the store when they run in for staple items in the hopes they'll buy something else, but why divide cheese between two ends of the store? It's either dairy or it isn't.
I'm not sure advertising works as well when grocery shopping is a scavenger-hunt type experience. Product placement might be a bigger issue, though if that brand of beans that's in the ethnic food aisle thinks they'll do better there, they're sure missing out on a lot of buyers who don't even look in that aisle (I don't think of looking in an ethnic food aisle for beans, I think of looking there for ingredients almost exclusively used for cooking for that particular ethnicity, though even then, I'd prefer if they just put those in the proper aisles, such as soy sauce or tahini in the aisle with the other sauces). And of course we all know that if you want a type of breakfast cereal that isn't sugar-laden with cartoon characters on the box and prizes inside, you have to look at the top shelf.
Maybe. 
