Comment: Hewden's Jeff Schofield says stay loyal to your favoured brands

Last week I learnt via an eminent BBC economic journalist, Ewan Davies, who was delivering a presentation to the Chartered Institute of Marketing, that during a downturn, consumers become more nostalgic and a key behavioural change is that they drink more tea than coffee. He went on to show several graphs from the last recession and recent sales analysis that seemed to indicate that if you worked for Typhoo or indeed PG Tips you could book your fortnight in Fuerteventura with a degree of confidence.

Since that event I noticed last week that counter recessionary measures had arrived in my own home. My wife Polly, said, when I discovered that my favoured brand of Heinz tomato ketchup had been replaced by a particularly poor ‘own-brand' effort from the good people at Tesco, that it was because of the recession.

In a way it felt like I imagine it was during the war effort. I wondered why this was the case, I am not under threat of redundancy and the honest reality is we probably have more spendable income than we had last year, so why should the stalwarts at Heinz suffer? I have been faithful through the good times, don't I owe it to the ketchup conglomerates to be strong, and remain loyal, at least to the point where my circumstances have actually changed?

Polly was reacting to the hourly caution and thrift messaging channeled by the media and, alas, weakened.

We all know what happened with the banks and that they caught a cold that the marketing director at Beechams (there are other own-brand cold remedies available) could only dream about. In addition we are more than aware we have a global credit crisis and unemployment will unfortunately rise. So what should we do? Can we dare to buck the trend and remain loyal to leading brands who have served us well over the past years; they are more likely to survive and be there for us at the other end, so let's not desert them now in their hour of need.

The reality is, and we do need to keep it real, it is going to remain odorous next year and beyond, particularly in the rental game. So let's get in position, be brave, take a risk or two, don't follow the pack and get closer to our customer; see what it is they actually want during more turbulent times and use our relationship and leading brandage to deliver it. Let's not give our customers an option to put an own brand alternative on their dining table.

So I am off for a coffee, not tea, and as I often say to my wife, Polly put the kettle on.