On White Hats And Black Hats

Well, another election is in the books. And while we ponder everyone’s reaction and wait to see what comes next, I thought I might share a thought that occurred to me. A thought that has nothing to do with the election, except in the most tangential way. Instead, it is about knee-jerk associations we have when see a word or a name. Is that word or name an “us” or a “them”?

I was recently driving past a construction site and noticed something. I noticed a big mobile air compressor – you have probably seen these. They are the kind that are on wheels and are towed behind a truck to be used for powering big air tools like jackhammers. It was branded as a “Sullair”. My very first thought was “Oh, those guys”. Sullair compressors are a definite “them” to me because in my first law office, we represented a company that manufactured a competitive product.

It was during those years of the 1980’s that I started paying attention whenever I saw one of those big compressors, usually as I drove through road construction zones. And of course, I always looked for the the distinctive blue and white Grimmer Schmidt compressors. Grimmer Schmidt was an “us” because the manufacturer was a client of the firm. Every competitive brand became a “them” in my mind. Like that Sullair. I know how silly this is – I have never owned such a compressor and would not know what to do with it if I did. It has been thirty years since I was in that law firm, and it has been probably about the same amount of time since our client company sold off the line. I don’t think the Grimmer Schmidt compressor is even being made any more. But they are still “us” to me, and all other brands are “them”.

I have that same reaction whenever I see the golden logo on the back of a car or truck made by Chevrolet. Chevrolet is “them”. I have never owned a Chevrolet, and cannot recall a single close relative who did. I have to do an asterisk here, because my step-mom had a Chevy Nova. But that was before she and my father married in the late 1960’s, and it was immediately replaced by an Oldsmobile following their nuptuals.

My father, on the other hand, was a Ford man. Almost every vehicle he ever picked out for himself was a Ford, Mercury or Lincoln. Ford was definitely an “us”, and remains so to this day. This is true even though that company has not made anything that has interested me much in the past twenty years and I have not bought a new/recent model in thirty. And even though Chevrolet has built many serviceable cars and trucks that have satisfied their owners, it remains a “them” to me. I am the same way with Honda and Toyota. Honda is “us” and Toyota is “them”.

This phenomenon even includes household products. As a teen, I greatly preferred Pepsi-Cola to Coca-Cola. Pepsi was “us” and Coke was “them”. This remains true, even though I have not bought carbonated cola in ages. But whenever a restaurant server offers the information that “we serve Coke products” I inwardly think “Oh, them” and stick with ice water. Of course, I stick with ice water in places that sell Pepsi products too, because a) I like ice water and b) I hate spending money on overly sweet beverages.

I am pretty sure I am not the only one who fights with this kind of tribal thinking, where even everyday consumer products are on a team, whether “ours” or “theirs”. Hopefully my intrepid commenters will chime in with some of your own examples. Or maybe I am just unusual. But then you already knew that.

33 thoughts on “On White Hats And Black Hats”

  1. A wonderful post and topic. My Dad worked for General Motors for 14 years, so we were inculcated into the GM “we,” although I later bought Ford products. I never wore Addidas running shoes until my oldest son joined a law firm that represented them. So I switched until he relocated to another job. My hiking buddy represented strip mall clients that were negatively affected by WalMart. Any time we passed one on the way to a trek, he railed against “them” with such intensity that I tried to avoid mentioning that I occasionally shopped there. Of course, sports rivalries are probably even deeper than political ones.

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    • You are right about the sports rivalries. In my state, there is a deep fissure between fans of Indiana University and Purdue University. Even though I am not a big sports guy, IU is “us” and Purdue is “them” at our house, mostly because IU gave me law school diploma.

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  2. Well, I used to be a Honda motorcycle snob. Harley riders were them, why would they ride a patently inferior machine and dress up as a pirate? But I have softened on that, since now I have zero Hondas and a couple of Kawasakis (almost as good and a LOT cheaper). From my Harley riding friends I’ve learned that the experience, the team spirit and the patriotism are big parts of the draw. So good for them, I don’t worry about it now.

    But you’re really got me thinking about air compressors now, will the Grimmer Schmidt usher in a new golden age of air compression, cut operating costs by a third on day one and have performance the likes of which no one has ever seen? Or will it spew polluted hot air at the sky, under perform on CFM and back over the very workers it was brought in to help? We will surely find out.

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  4. I grew up in a household where the “good car” was invariably an Oldsmobile. So, for years, GM in general, and Oldsmobile in particular, was on the “us” team. Of course, GM management did their level-best to end that association. I’ve driven Hondas for over 40 years…we now have a Honda and a Ford. I’ll be looking for a new car in 2025, and Hondas will definitely be at the top of my list. I prefer both the way they drive, and their styling.

    For soft drinks, I’ve always preferred Coke to Pepsi…or any other soft drink. Although I’ve drastically cut back my consumption of any soft drink over the past 20 years.

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    • I think almost everyone has cut back on soft drink consumption. In my parents’ day, a bottle of Coke was 6.5 ounces. When I was young, 12 ounces was a standard size. Now, if you buy a soft drink in a vending machine (if you can afford it, anyway 🙂 ) the bottle is 20 ounces. If I am going to drink 20 ounces of something, it will be either water or maybe tea.

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  5. It’s amazing as I age, that what happens is the brands and options I treasured for years, slide backwards and “go bad”. I didn’t leave them, they left me, and its an open mind that keeps testing the new and different. Best not to build up any emotion demonizing the competition! My Dad, who was shot to smithereens on Guadalcanal, would have never driven a Japanese car, and actually vowed never to do so when I started driving Toyota in 1975; he eventually ended up driving a few Hondas and ended with a Toyota in retirement. He went through a series of American made company cars in the 70’s and 80’s that were amazing crap, and falling apart constantly, so when it came time to spend his own money in retirement, he looked at my long running and trouble free Toyotas, and the path was obvious. I give him great credit for rethinking the situation! Even myself, a loyal Toyota driver since 1975, was not that happy with my last purchase, a 2005 Scion xB “Box”. I loved the cars format, seating and egress phenomenal, but mechanically they were back-sliding on quality control, and had to replace a water pump and starter well before my other Toyota models, altho still in the mid 100,000’s; even the wheels were not coated as well, and it developed a wheel rusting problem that cause the tires to leak air in the winter, something that never happened on any other Toyota I ever owned. When I needed to replace, an article in a car magazine from their asian reporter, swayed me to try Korean when he stated that the type of talk he heard at meetings from Kia and Hyundai, were similar to what he heard from Toyota and Honda in the 80’s, but not any more.

    BTW, I owe my amazing body to early drinking of Pepsi, NOT Coke. I was rail thin, with my parents denying us sodas except on picnics and holidays. When I finally starting getting and spending that sweet, sweet, paperboy money, and well before a lot of diet soda; I couldn’t get enough Pepsi! I have never been the “correct” weight since! A recent foray into Mexican Pepsi at one of my local bodegas, reminded me of why I liked it! The unadulterated south-of-the-border blend was an explosions of subtle flavors and tones I had not tasted in a while! If I’m offered Coke, I’ll drink it, but not preferred. I think my anti-Coke stance over the years was acerbated by my years in retail advertising, some for a grocery chain; where I heard horror stories of the shenanigans people like Coke did to control shelf space and eliminate competition. Some wonderful small-batch regional soda companies were driven into non-existence by these big players.

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    • I think shelf space in grocery stores is the same story in all categories. Whether it is candy, canned goods or soft drinks, two big companies get space for way too many varieties and there is no room for anyone else. That is why I love browsing the candy selection at Cracker Barrel – they offer products that cannot get within 5 miles of a regular grocery store or pharmacy.

      And it is true, we must always be on our guard. A car brand (or brand of anything else, for that matter) may have gotten a reputation, but every few years there is a new model and we have no way of knowing if it is as good as the older ones at least until enough time passes.

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  7. Hubby, The Car Guy, is a Chrysler man (because his dad worked for Chrysler.) But he is also a Mercedes and Porsche fan because he has one of each. Motorcyles – Harley tops the list because that was the last bike he had. Power tools – DeWalt.

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    • I will confess to being a Chrysler guy too – for a long time many of my favorite cars were made by Chrysler. But it was an acquired taste because beyond a 55 DeSoto my grandma had when I was a kid, not a single one of them was anywhere around my extended family or in my neighborhood. During my childhood of the 60’s and early 70’s, there were more Studebakers on my block than there were Chrysler products. So I guess Chrysler vehicles are something that transitioned from a “them” to an “us” in my book.

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  8. I was never allowed to drink pop when I was growing up, so I never really developed a liking for pop of any kind even when I got older. If I’m thirsty I just have water like you do JP. However, I was shopping at the mall, maybe around the mid-70s and someone came over to me and asked if I had a few minutes to take a survey. I said “sure” and I was whisked behind a black curtain to sit at a table where there were two glasses of “cola” drinks and a little bowl of saltine crackers. I was asked to sip from one glass, have some crackers, then sip from the other glass and tell which drink tasted better. It turned out I picked Pepsi over Coca-Cola as I found Coke very sweet. I told the interviewer I never drank pop in case they would like to know – it didn’t matter. So I didn’t get a coupon or voucher of any type for my time, just a thank-you and later I learned that this was part of a marketing campaign called “The Pepsi Challenge”.

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      • It was fun to do JP and I was also involved in something else which took an entire Sunday afternoon. I hope I’ve not relayed this story to you before but, shortly after I bought my Buick Regal in 1988, I got a letter and I don’t recall whom it was from. It invited me to meet a group of people at the parking lot of the FoMoCo Glass House in Dearborn where we would board a bus with the others and we all would be blindfolded until we entered a building in an undisclosed location. There would be 25 or 30 of us and we would spend an afternoon looking at and giving our opinion on prototypes of automobiles (cars only, no SUVs or trucks). We then had to complete a form about our opinion on each prototype, offer suggestions and would be blindfolded to walk to the bus, removing the blindfold only after getting back at the FoMoCo Glass House. We were compensated for our time and effort. We had no idea where we were. It was exciting and they were not futuristic cars in the least. What we had in common with one another was we had each recently purchased a vehicle.

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      • Yes, it was JP! For sure, you would have enjoyed it being a “car guy” but it was fun without having your extensive knowledge of cars. A friend of the family was an older engineer at Ford (using a traditional board, not CAD/CAM) and he used to come for dinner every week. He was fascinated by me retelling about what occurred, asking me every last detail about what I saw and just how secretive it was.

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  9. I was raised in a family that very much had these sorts of loyalties to brands and products as well as certain lifestyle choices (e.g., we were definitely NOT “sports” people and I was raised to eschew any association with or loyalty to a particular professional sports team). Funny thing is, aside from the sports thing and a lizard-brain devotion to Chrysler products, I’ve lost track of what any of those loyalties were. I’ll note that in nearly 50 years of personal car ownership, I’ve never owned a Chrysler product; and as to the sports thing, I long ago moved to New England and had children and had no choice but to have partaken of the Red Sox Kool Aid.

    I think that there is something innately human about wanting to have a tribe and therefore to take on tribal markings. Or to have an anti-tribe and therefore reject particular tribal markings. And that’s true even if we cannot rationally explain (or in my case, remember) the whats or whys of those tribal affiliations.

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  10. I just thought I’d throw this out there as well. The last time I sat through a marketing research meeting, and I’ll openly admit it was a while ago; “Brand Buyers”, tho not particularly “Brand Loyalists”, but people that thought they were getting something special, or some sort of perceived quality by buying specific brands, had a tendency to track on the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum. People that track higher on that spectrum are more likely to do research and check reviews (if you can believe them, hopefully from vetted sources), before they spend money on any big expense purchases. Having a brand name that has a specific cachet in the market might be a starting place for some purchasers: the more educated might use it as a starting point for research rather than a blind OK to purchase something. There used to be fascinating stories in retail about higher end brands that got cheapened, or ended up at the over-stock shops, and hence dropped by their original upscale core customer, because they were “adopted” by people that the brand did not want to be associated with. Another statistic was that many people with higher incomes cherry-pick luxury items. You might own a Porsche, and live on a better side of town, but still buy your socks and underwear at Target. You’re not buying gold-plated underwear at an exclusive menswear emporium! Anyway, just more info, and the reason I always found marketing/advertising/and retail so dog-gone interesting!

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  11. Mobile air compressors are something I’ve rarely given thought to… but now that you mention it, yes I do have a Home Team for them. For me, it’s Ingersoll Rand. When I was a kid, my father worked as a construction manager, and I loved occasionally going to work with him. Most of the contractors there used Ingersoll Rand air compressors. So that became an “ours” brand for me – even if its a product that I know virtually nothing about.

    Regarding consumer products in general, I agree with what Andy wrote above. Having seen many brands that I treasured for years slide downhill and “go bad,” I’ve become much less loyal or sentimental. One such product is Breyers Ice Cream – it was my family’s main ice cream brand, and I was loyal to Breyers well into adulthood. However, at some point they were bought out by a global conglomerate, and their ice cream turned into junk – not creamy at all just overall lousy-tasting. Breyers used to be “my” ice cream, and everything else seemed foreign, but they lost my loyalty, and I haven’t had the stuff in years. I could probably say the same thing about dozens of other consumer brands. I guess I’ve just become jaded.

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    • That’s the funny part – how something can be an “us” when it’s something completely irrelevant to life.
      And I agree completely on Breyer’s. It was a treat when I was a teen – far superior to the “regular” brands in the store. Somewhere along the line it got cheapened/ruined to the point where it is not as good as store-branded ice cream.

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