Private Label Brands -- A Growth Opportunity for
Retailers and Entrepreneurs! Private Labeling is taking top quality, time tested, proven products and formulations and packaging them with your brand, logo, and label.
Today's retail marketers and entrepreneurs are managing their proprietary brands with the same combination of care and innovation as manufacturers of national brands.
Private Label allows retail marketers and entrepreneurs to diversify their offerings 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. 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.
How is Private Label Thinking Different?
Retailers and entrepreneurs 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 or entrepreneur to have access to these products. It is proprietary brands, exclusively available from a specific retailer or entrepreneur, that can be a magnet to draw people to purchase only from them versus others and accrue direct meaning and loyalty to the overarching banner.
In order to be truly successful, retailers and entrepreneurs must advance from the generic or store brand mindset of the past to a new Private Label paradigm. Many retailers and entrepreneurs have begun to describe their Private Label brands as “own” brands because there is recognition that these proprietary, exclusive offerings are tools that represent momentous power and potential for the entire retail store.
The term “own” brands acknowledges that today's visionary retail marketers and entrepreneurs have powerful proprietary portfolios that they control and manage and there is potential to reap bigger and better rewards. Those retailers and entrepreneurs who appreciate the magnitude of this brand opportunity have created a new industry standard in their realm of influence and activity.
“Own” brands should be articulated and developed in a way that they not only fit with the brand promise of the retail
store or entrepreneur, but if effective, they also give consumer drivers a key reason to keep coming back for more.
This new paradigm of Private Label thinking requires that retailers and entrepreneurs consider an arsenal of often overlooked business and branding tools to further their success.
Category management and brand management must work together to fuel the marketing strategy. One cannot replace the other. Both product and positioning points of difference set the “own” brand apart in consumers' minds. A consumer-centric approach is at the heart of “own” brand development and elevates above the product-centric thinking of the past.
In order to have a consistent and compelling brand voice, retailers and entrepreneurs need to understand the contribution and role of proprietary or "own" brands within their business and also within the lives of their consumers. “Own” brand products, branded communication, and expressions should all be developed in accordance with this thinking.
When “own” brands are appropriately created and steered, they have the potential to reach their pinnacle of success. In doing so, they create a persuasive connection with consumers that draws them into a retail store or to an entrepreneur, but more importantly, allows them to become an essential, experiential, and indispensable lifestyle choice that they embrace over the long-term.
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