A Lucozade too far

Judy Delin: 28 April 2009 in Good and bad stuff

Shopping with mother is getting to be a difficult business these days. She's 85, and gets worn out and bewildered by the goods on display in the supermarket - so many of them, and so different from what she's expecting and can remember. Going to Sainsbury's is something she looks forward to. But when she gets there, she often ends up cutting her visit short, or coming back with things she didn't mean to buy.

Last Saturday, she stood in front of a display of Flora margarine fully two metres square. Flora Light. Flora Buttery. Flora Pro-activ. All in three sizes. What she wants is 'normal Flora', now known as Flora Original, and almost indistinguishable (to her) from all the others. She looked them over, at first enthusiastically, and then with a growing realization that she no longer understood what was on offer. 'Oh', she said. 'It's all different.'

It was the same with the Lucozade. She used to give it to us when we were ill. But what she wants is a big glass bottle with orange cellophane round it. What she sees are sportpacks, multipacks, and plastic bottles in several sizes in yellow, green, and what looks like two shades of orange. She wants the ordinary one, now also known as 'Original'. Apart from its design being completely alien, 'Original' is so similar in colour to the orange flavour that we have a job distinguishing the two. Particularly because the name of the flavour is in stylized, hard-to-read type, blended in with the rest of the design at the bottom of the label. It's the same with Fairy Liquid. She likes the 'new' shape bottle (it's nicer than the white plastic cylinder we used to have, she thinks) but now it comes in Eucalyptus, Pink Grapefruit and Garden Mint, Apple Quake, Lime and Lemongrass, Strawberry Flame, Passion Flower Storm, and Lemon Twister as well as the old one. Luckily, the bottle is clear, so she can look at the colour of the liquid - but she still struggles to remember which of the three shades of green is the one she usually has.

We almost give up entirely with the laundry products, which she hasn't understood at all since they evolved from powder to tablets, capsules, liquitabs, liquid, and a welter of other formats. She is looking for Surf or Dreft powder. In a box. But she perks up when we get to the Jaffa Cakes. They are in their familiar blue packet. But wait - she's picked up the blackcurrant ones. I know she wants orange, so I tactfully swap them over.

It's like this all round the store. Before long, she gives up, feeling foolish, and lets me choose things. 'Whatever you want', she says, even though I don't live with her and won't be using any of the things that go in her trolley. 'You choose.'

Mother is past the era when she would try out new things for a treat, and now looks for the familiar. She's right when she says it's all different - but that's not the problem. The problem is that, while the product ranges have expanded, the products themselves are so similar in appearance that they're impossible to distinguish from one another. Things that look familiar have burgeoned into legions of products that, to her, are unknown and now unknowable territory. Anyone with a basic understanding of branding will know that what's going on is that brand owners are creating consistency in their product ranges, preserving brand visual identity into product extensions. The mantra for branding is consistency - which seems to mean making different things look identical. But for mother (and for me, I am sure, in time) the increased level of product literacy required to find what she wants among an extended family of products is a cognitive load too much. It wears her out. It makes her want to go back to a time and place where there were fewer things, and those things were recognisable.

Mother has vascular dementia. It's very common in old age. It means that it's difficult to take in and retain new information. She can't now learn that a product range has changed to incorporate new distractors that will trap the unwary. She'll seize on the familiar, and often get home before she realizes that the apparently familiar wasn't enough - that she should have studied the whole shelf, appraised the family resemblances, read the labels, and found whatever the 'normal' or original product is now called. And because she can't learn, she's doomed to repeat the pattern every time she goes shopping, unless someone goes with her. But the trip to Sainsbury's is practically the only thing she can do on her own any more, and so that's a great shame. She's fit and active, and likes to get out and do things. It's just the memory thing.

Unfortunately, the memory thing does not just affect my mother. According to the Alzheimer's Research Trust, there are currently 700,000 people living with dementia in the UK today, a number expected to double within twenty years. 163,000 new cases of dementia occur in England and Wales each year - one every 3.2 minutes. Not all of those people have cognitive impairment, but the number of people affected by such impairment is likely to increase by 66 percent before 2031.

This figure includes dementias of all sources - Alzheimer's, vascular dementia (multi-infarct dementia and Binswanger's disease), Lewy Body dementia, and fronto-temporal dementia which includes Pick's disease and primary progressive aphasia. I repeat the list because Alzheimer's, having an organization or two named after it, is the most well-known cause of dementia. Mother doesn't have Alzheimer's. She does not have the mood swings, loss of self, alienation of relatives. But her loss of short-term memory causes her distress because it doesn't allow her to filter information as well as she used to. It makes new scenes confusing and hard to navigate. And that just makes her feel she can't cope with the world any more.

Back at the branding agencies, meanwhile, we're all going with consistency. We're happily creating slabs of similar products to 'own' the shelf space. Chocolate and cat food are a sea of purple. Dog food is a sea of yellow. Granted, it helps people zoom in on the right part of the shelf. Once they're there, literate, alert shoppers learn without thinking how to filter out the similarities and go for differentiating minutiae to find the product they want. This places a cognitive load on everybody - and we know that people's ability to cope with the load decreases under stress. But we put up with it, and if we make mistakes, it's because we're tired, or it's Friday, or we're shopping with toddlers. We learn for next time.

But think of the trouble you're in when you can't learn for next time. When you're one of the 700,000 people in our population - without considering those whose ability to learn is impaired by things other than dementia - you may want to choose the nearest thing, whether you want it or not, and go home. And then look forward to it, before finding it's the wrong thing. As a daughter, trying to smoothe the bumps out of life for an ageing, dependent mother, the thought of her being disappointed like that, even if it's only over a packet of wrong-flavour Jaffa Cakes, practically makes me weep. How's that for brand experience.