For many years, the budget supermarkets of this world (Aldi and Lidl) have been known for ‘copying‘ other brands’ packaging and products in an attempt to convince customers to ditch their beloved brands for their cheaper products.

In principle, this doesn’t sound the worst idea in the world: customers get an idea of what they are buying easily, the supermarket sells more products and get exposure online when people compare the goods while not really upsetting anyone as the big businesses still have their domination.

However we don’t live in a world where stuff happens ‘in principle’ and there has been a lot of controversy over some of the copied products of more recent years.

In the most part, the problem comes when the budget supermarket behemoths of this world decide it’s a good idea to copy the small businesses of this world. The problem with this is that the big world of supermarkets takes a lot of the sales from the small businesses which upsets people for the obvious reasons.

A notable example of this is the controversy with Heck Sausages. The CEO of Heck sent a strongly worded letter to Aldi complaining about how similar the packaging was and that it would mislead consumers.

This caused an awful lot of backlash as people hated the idea that Aldi was capitalising on the success of small businesses. Surprisingly, the German giant backed down and you won’t be finding this packaging in stores anymore thanks to Heck’s persistence.

The most notable example of budget supermarket copying is the recent Aldi vs M&S saga, the war of the caterpillar cakes. I’ve written about this before in great detail but to sum it up the companies fell out over the appearance of cakes and it was settled out of court after much amusing social media battle.

Although the conclusion was less than exciting, the debacle drew more attention to the subject of copycat products as everyone was discussing and debating who was right.

Some clever social media led to most people favouring Aldi but there was one key difference to this and the Heck case: the size of M&S. Two massive corporations fighting it out over copyright is firstly exciting but also doesn’t seem unfair on either part so it sort of works.

In short, big companies can fight it out all they want in my eyes but if the budget supermarkets are going to pick fights with the little guys then they’d better be prepared for the backlash.

What do you think? Do comment your thoughts below.