Paper towel brands abound in the home market, and for good reason. Today, savvy and conscious homeowners are constantly looking for brands that can offer them the best value for their money. Marketing psychology studies have shown that homeowners tend to exhibit consumer loyalty to virtually all household items, from laundry detergent to furniture polish. Additionally, homeowners often buy these items wholesale or in bulk, meaning consumer loyalty should mean a lot to the companies involved. It’s no surprise then that paper towel brands, like all other brands, seek to define themselves in the eyes of consumers.
The thing is, when it comes to paper towels, the quality most people look for is absorbency, a quality that is directly related to the strength of the towel. Experiments have long been conducted to compare the performance of paper towel brands against one another. These experiments range from those done at home by consumers looking to get more for their money, to those given to high school science classes as projects. Perhaps more noteworthy are those conducted under strict conditions by aspiring physicists at academic research centers such as the Paper Science and Technology Institute and the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in Atlanta, Georgia.
The most popular paper towel brands, which make the products most frequently included in these studies, are Bounty, Brawny, 7th Generation, Viva and Sparkle. The first property, absorbency, is actually the most important when it comes to determining cost savings. Many consumers are drawn to these towel brands that have more sheets per roll without considering how many sheets they will actually need to clean up spills or messes. A $1.50 roll of paper towels that claims to have, say, 100 sheets per roll can actually end up being much more expensive than a two-dollar roll with only 90 sheets per roll that can clean up spills using half the number of sheets of the first roll ordered. “Cheaper” towels can only do half the job of “expensive” towels, and as a result, it will require you to buy twice as many to clean the same mess.
Another important quality of paper towels is their so-called “moisture resistance”. The term describes the ability of what is ultimately a soluble material to hold together when loaded with a large amount of liquid. Many consumers have probably had the experience of purchasing paper towels that exhibit excellent strength when dry, but crumble in the hands the moment they get wet. In fact, it can be very frustrating when you’re trying to clean up a mess and find that your crumpled paper towel is dragging bits of soggy paper all over the place.
Absorbency and wet strength are two very important qualities that consumers are advised to look for when making their choice among the often bewildering array of paper towel brands on the market today.