The growth of private-label brands is keeping managers of national brands awake at night. But the surge of retailers’ brands isn’t occurring uniformly across all categories. In fact, national brands still dominate some categories with an iron fist. Among them are Coca-Cola, Tide, and a host of Kraft subbrands, and a yearlong shopper-experience study by The Integer Group and M/A/R/C Research identifies these as brands that consumers would least likely trade for private-label products.
Besides improving the packaging for their store brands, retailers are also smart enough to identify categories in which one or two dominant national brands are king of the castle. Retailers are tending to focus the growth of their own brands in categories lacking a dominant brand.
