Why I Like Consumer Staples

1) Population growth slowing and that stability and lower growth means COMPETITION. High focus on ROI and necessities
2) Inflation risk from QE means it is good to have pricing power, sell necessities
3) Good exposure to current emerging market consumers
4) Simple business models, no technology risk, benefit from technology
5) Psychology of habit, trust

The "new normal" is eventually going to be a global growth environment where the rate of natural demographic expansion has slowed down over time, until its reached zero. Every ecosystem matures. Mathematically with many kinds of growth you often see the same sigmoidal curve type pattern. I think it’s important to look for places where there may already be highly successful companies at being simple, consistent and profitable in a mature environment, "low/no growth" environment. So, at some point the human population on earth is going to be "some stable range", rather than adding millions of people every year.

I also think you want to own companies that sell necessities. If things are stable and growth is low, budgets are constrained, resources get conserved rather than consumed, ROI is a high focus, and people are looking to optimize their spend - it is better to own companies that sell things people need, not things they just want. Consumer staples are by definition, products people need. The industry is also one such space where there has been that kind of lower growth, boring stability for many years with big name companies like P&G, Phillip Morris,  Pepsi, etc all the while churning out regular, consistent cash flow.

Consumer staples companies also have good exposure to more positive population growth rates in the developing world. With population expected to trend towards 9 billion globally and then level off in the upcoming decades, they can also position to capitalize on these positive demographic and economic trends in emerging markets.

Consumer staples companies are in industries that are slow & simple. Despite the tumultuousness and "black swan" risks of the modern world, their business models are hard to invalidate. There isn't a lot of technology change that can make them irrelevant or displace them. In fact, they benefit from leveraging those technologies to run their operations more efficiently. There are strong industrial era economies of scale they can take advantage of in production of their goods. And people are people with certain daily needs… food, drink, painkillers, first aid, soap, sanitation, etc.

Info Overload: Who is the modern consumer?

Two huge seeming problems people have in the modern world today are that there is an overwhelming amount of complexity and information to deal with to make a decision, and equally a lack of time to deal with it in. Doesn't matter if its a young adult in the process of picking their college major, or trying to decide what restaurant you want to go for dinner at. If I truly want to evaluate all my options and make the 100% optimized decision, it’s practically impossible to do. So complexity would seem like a big problem, information overload would seem like a big problem, so how are people still able to go about their days effectively?

What the amount of information available in the modern age makes truly obvious, is that we aren't perfectly rational human calculators. The simple answer for what we do with all that information available? We ignore it. We try not to get overwhelmed by it. We come up with simple systems like checklists to avoid complexity. We go off of habits, personal recommendations, gut feelings, trust. We tend to make decisions with quick rule of thumb calculations that won't always leave us with the 100% optimal choice, but will get us from point A to point B without doing 10 hours of charts and research to pick a brand of Peanut Butter.

Products that help me simplify things, match well with "quick rules" or heuristics I use, and help me deal with all that complexity will be successful. And that’s where brands come in and why I like consumer staples.

Brands and Habits: How do I deal with the complexity? 

One quick rule of thumb you can use to evaluate a product, "Have I heard of them before?". If you haven't, that's going to need to be subject to more scrutiny. Brand name recognition is similar to the "social proof" phenomenon that is evolutionarily wired into us, and helps us with an indication a product is a safe option. By going with the name you know or a brand you trust, you can save the psychic cost and time of making a decision - which actually as the decisions pile up can be surprisingly taxing, and worthwhile saving on.

Every company has a brand. The key factor in the appeal of consumer staples companies are their ability to create and own trusted brands for products people need in their daily lives. 

In general for any kind of buyer, people will pay more for assurance of quality, and avoidance of risk. They'll pay up for certainty. So going with a trusted brand name product helps me to do that as well. Where a product might be something that they regularly eat, brush their teeth with, & include intimately in daily life that effect may be magnified in favor of consumer staples companies. People buy the comfort and perceived safety of going with the brand they recognize, or on the other side of the coin, the fear of going with the product that they don’t recognize. If you are buying consulting services or hiring a new employee, its easy to go with the guy who has a personal recommendation from a friend or colleague, versus a similar candidate lacking that social proof. If you are buying personal health products its similarly easy to pick the Advil or Tylenol off the shelf rather than going with some weird store brand option that you have less assurance with to save a few cents.

That brings me to habits, and another reason why I think consumer staples companies are interesting. Maybe its been on a trip, or moving to a new neighborhood, but everyone's had the experience at one point or another of going into a new grocery store that they haven't been in before. Suddenly, there's a million choices and you better have a list to follow or you'll be wandering around for what feels like years trying to figure out what exactly it is you need and where it might be located in this particular new store. 

If I am buying a computer, I do research and find the best option, once. If I am buying shampoo at a grocery store, there is a huge amount of value in having a routine, a habit, and a set practices that I employ each and every trip I make in order to save me time. Just imagine the new grocery store and how much longer than usual that might take before you get familiar with it, how much more searching you would do. Again, this is where brands and habits come in. I just kind of pick one off a name I know and like, and then if it works, I keep buying it. It’s a much less analytical decision, more gut level and value in repeating the same choice.

A benefit for consumer staples companies is that with small expenses its much easier to spend more to make a decision on loyalty for a brand. Paying up for that brand you know "feels" a lot cheaper for a consumer when you are paying for laundry detergent versus say a BMW or something. With frequently repeated purchases there is also a higher cost to being analytical and more value to forming a habit just because of the fact that if you don't, you will have to spend time conducting this analysis very often. Frequency magnifies the reasons why we use our quick decision making tools like habits, loyalty and brand recognition.

Consumer Staples

So, these factors all tie together very favorably in my view for big consumer staples companies. They have enduring pricing power because of the brand factor & trust, which are deeply tied in with social psychology, perception, and how people have made decisions all the way back to the proverbial Savannah. In a "boring" low growth environment, which these companies have already been in for a while, they continue to churn out free cash flow, and given the dynamics that create their pricing power I have a hard time imagining a scenario where basic human nature about trust changes, or technology somehow invalidates people’s needs for food, drink, basic health and sanitation, tobacco, etc.

One risk would be that people become more comfortable with off-brand products or become more solely price focused. Another downfall could be that they can't figure out how to succeed with emerging market consumers.

Other means of pricing power:

Individual staples companies like a Phillip Morris or Coca Cola have additional pricing power aside from the brand recognition & loyalty in that their products are highly and/or somewhat addictive, respectively… just another way of having the demand for their products be strongly in-elastic and unresponsive to different changes in the environment.