This paper addresses the role of private labels within the perspective of Western Europe and reviews the main factors affecting private label development within the region, the future of private labels vs. brands, and the impact of supercenters and hypermarkets in the changing equity of private labels.
This paper provides an assessment of private labels from the perspective of Latin America, and specifically from the six leading economies of Latin America: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru, as a response to the following questions received from ESOMAR regarding private labels in Latin America: -What is the role of private labels in your region and how has it changed in the past five years?-What are the factors influencing this change?-What are the characteristics impacting private label spending? -What sectors/categories have been more/less affected by the role of private label?-Are there sectors/categories where brands are impervious to the presence of private label? -What are your predictions of the future role of Private Labels? -Are Private Labels the brands of tomorrow? -What is the future of brands that we know today?
This paper addresses the growth of private labels from the perspective of the Middle East and finds the rising equity of private labels in the Middle East and Africa presents the research industry with new opportunities for growth and profitability.
This paper provides a perspective on private labels in the United States. The growing deal-mindedness of American consumers as well as a surge in their aspirations may result in another leap forward for private labels.
This paper outlines the current status of private label in Asia and predicts the future of both brand and private label in Asia. The presence of private label in Asia is linked to the development of the trade structure by country as well as the presence of the global retailers.
In all countries, distributors' brands have been facing the same problem : how to change consumers' perceptions, without advertising, from inferior imitations of national brands to quality alternatives. To do so the packaging is the main media : one has witnessed the development of retailers' own label products that look almost identical to well-known brands, considered as the quality reference of the segment. This deliberate imitation is designed to induce beliefs of internal equivalence, This practice has immediately called the attention of manufacturers on many grounds. It is a typical trade-mark infringement and predates intellectual property. Through R&D, quality and advertising the brand signs become assets: they acquire meaning, they become words or icons saying quality and positioning. As such they have financial value. This is why copycat brands use these signs : they are a ladder to quality perceptions. On ethical grounds, it may create confusion, some consumers mistaking the own label product for the manufacturer's brand. Actually, in many countries, imitation is unfair if consumers "paying little attention may perceive the copy as being the original brand". Finally, look-alike brands may give the impression that the manufacturer of the proprietary brand has made the own label product. The paper presents a brand new methodology addressing the issue of measuring perceptual confusion. It also assesses the inferences concerning the manufacturer of such copies. The results are straightforward Good look-alike private labels do create a lot of confusion, at least the first time they are encountered by a consumer (later, the consumer may be on his guard). Similarity of packagings do lead consumers to believe that manufacturers are identical.
April 2, 1993 was a historic day in the U. S. private-label scare. On Marlboro Friday, Philip Morris decreased the price of Marlboro cigarettes by 40 cents a pack in response to tire increasing popularity of cheaper cigarettes. In one day, the company lost $13.4 billion in stock-market value. Whether called private labels, own labels, or store brands, non-branded products have become a source of major concern for consumer-goods manufacturers in the 1990s. If private labels are here to stay, advertisers are going to have to face this challenge head-on. But how? To answer this question, we will explore tire reasons for private labels' increased popularity and the means that advertisers have for fighting back. research systems corporation (RSC) has long advocated the use of advertising as a means of increasing market share; numerous validation studies have demonstrated the link between persuasive advertising and sales. However, until recently, no data was available to support the use of persuasive advertising as a means of dealing with private-label products. Today, the results of a new study will be presented that explores the effects of pricing, television media spending, and advertising effectiveness on both private-label market share and total category volume.
The following, linked, papers argue that representative consumer panels, reflecting actual purchasing behaviour, have a unique role to play in the provision of relevant, actionable information to both the retailers and the manufacturers who wish to sell to them, whether nationally or on a pan-European basis. Allan Breese draws on his own, and TN AGB's, extensive experience in working with such information in Great Britain, which has been in the forefront of many retailing trends and in the development of a panel based response to changing data needs. His case histories cover three main areas: 1) The basic, but important: evaluation of retailer strengths and weaknesses by market, Private Label levels, penetration and trip size/frequency, demographic profiles and loyalty. 2) Shopper studies which analyse why retailers under trade or over trade, and who is benefiting from lost sales. 3) Tailor made studies of the behaviour patterns of a retailer's shoppers, with specific reference to segmentation by size and frequency of shopping trip. Richard Piper examines briefly the current similarities and differences in trade structures and developments in the main European countries, using a major retail study conducted by Europanel, before moving on to illustrate the essential cross- country comparability of consumer panel data and the steps that are being taken to increase its utility at a European level. He includes a description of both the existing Europanel Database and the disaggregated version that is being developed.
More purchasing power, the need for a guaranteed profit margin, tougher retail competition, the recession and the need to have own (ISP's directed the European food retailers to a policy in which own brands became more important than in former times. Due to this change in environment, there was an acceleration in the growth of the market shares for Private Labels from 1980 up to 1984, but figures for the last 2 years indicate that a new equation point has been reached.