In What Ways Do You Think Department Stores Could Develop Own-brand Products For The Future?
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on Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 at 12:04 am and is filed under Product Branding.
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Own Brands now occupy around 45% of major supermarket shelf space in the UK. This is worrying because few of these retailers advertise and therefore have a high cost advantage over manufacturers. Another cost advantage is that their own brands are often made and sold to them at marginal costs. Consumers benefit but as stated by another respondent above, consumers see them as low cost, low quality so there are limits to further shelf space expansion in own brands. On a personal level, I find most own brand food products to be either bland or just too salty. Onr also has concerns about how the retailers control quality.
Historically, Henri Nestle was the first food producer to create his own brand. Before that all grocery products were sold in sacks and weighed out by the retailer with frequent adulteration such as adding chalk powder to flour. Today, there are many small to medium sized producers who do not have a brand and who produce exclusively for the major stores so they will be happy to see own labels expand. But then, branded goods producers whose shelf space is continually shrinking will not be happy that own labels ride on the back of their expensive advertising.
Promotion strategies can be described as “pull” and “push”. Some activities pull consumers into stores looking for new products or couponed products and “push” strategies are designed to move the products off the shelves. Retailers with own brands enjoy the benefits of both at no cost. But branded goods manufacturers need the retailers more than the retailers need them
While retailers must stock brand leaders to draw in consumers, they do not really need secondary brands. Manuufacturers of branded goods find that something like 95% of their sales go through fewer than 500 companies and the other 5% is sold through thousands of smaller firms. Clearly, the big retailers hold the whip hand (although there was a time about 20 years ago when Tesco stopped buying Nescafe but had to take it back after six months owing to consumer demand).
Own-brand used to be regarded as cheap but you will notice that many supermarkets have a range of own-brands from value through to luxury – as we begin to trust the supermarket as a brand we trust what they sell with their name on it – just look at the success of M&S food.
If you want to do some research then http://www.spideybiz.co.uk has loads of useful sites to look at.
I’d like stores to offer come– back cards. If you come back you get something free. Or if so many holes are punched on the card you can get a higher discount for being a good customer.
The brand doesn’t matter.