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Retail Buying

Notes 13.2 Shift in the Private Label Paradigm

Private label brands have clearly become a more instrumental priority for today’s retailers.
They are starting to diversify their offering beyond the expected, enabling them to compete
more effectively in existing product categories and foray into new and different product categories
that have traditionally been dominated by national brand players.
In many instances, private labels have surpassed a national brand’s capacity to deliver on visibility,
consumer interest, involvement and appeal. Proprietary brand decision makers are often able
to command close to parity or parity pricing for their products, without articulating cost as the
differentiating factor. This represents a point of departure from the past: there is an
acknowledgement that today’s proprietary brands have the ability to transcend the negative
baggage and problems of traditional store brands, creating unique, resonant benefit propositions
for consumers.
Retailers are beginning to recognize that they cannot simply rely on national branded products
to draw consumers into their stores and sustain loyalty. This is due to the fact that manufacturers’
product brands often have the ability to transcend geographic location, distribution channel or
retailer (e.g., Bounty paper towels are available at a wide array of grocery stores, drug stores
and mass merchandisers across the United States.) Due to this pervasive presence of national
brands, consumers need not have a strong relationship with a particular brick-and-mortar store
setting to have access to these products. It is only the proprietary brands, exclusively available
at a specific retailer that can be a magnet to draw people into its store versus others and accrue
direct meaning and loyalty to the overarching banner.

Notes Private label products have driven branded manufacturers to cut down their prices,
be innovative, thus, in all sense, private products are today a big influence on the current
brands today.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
3. Retailers are beginning to recognize that they cannot simply rely on national branded
products to draw ................... into their stores and sustain loyalty.
4. Private label brands have clearly become a more instrumental priority for today’s
.........................
13.3 Brands Take a New Approach to Private Label Branding

There are certain contemporary brands that have either been placed on a pedestal or carefully
noted by retail marketers and consumers alike. Their situations and strategies start to lend
insight into a more compelling definition for a retailer’s proprietary brand offering and more
importantly, a sense of how to optimize success as an exclusive, proprietary brand.

It is worth mentioning that these examples are mostly in grocery and mass, however, they still
inform and enlighten the strategic approach of other types of retailers including drugstores and
department stores.
Retailers in the United Kingdom have been private label innovators in many respects. Take the
supermarket landscape as a case in point. Since, the UK consumer buys a significant proportion
of his weekly purchases from one store, the competitive focus is at the store level and this is

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