Advances in National Brand and Private Label Marketing

Over the past few years, private labels have gained larger share in the organized retail sector. The influence of price similarity and dissimilarity on consumers’ judgments of a private label’s quality and purchase intention is studied using a controlled experiment with a sample of 356 respondents. Hypotheses are derived from relevant literature positing the effects of packaging and price on quality perception and willingness-to-buy. We hypothesize that higher price difference between private labels and national brands positively affect quality perceptions and inversely influence purchase intention. Experiments indicate that similarity of a private label packaging with a national brand has a significant effect on perceived quality and purchase intention. Likewise, the interaction effect of price and packaging strategies (imitation), in turn, positively influences the dependent variables. The results are significant the consumer packaged goods category (cookies). Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed followed by the limitation and future research.

Black Friday is a biggest holiday shopping season in the United States and has been regarded as a great opportunity for retailers to increase their sales. Through the years, this practice has been extended to other countries in the world. Although its global widespread, there has been a lack of research attention to consumers’ attitudes toward and behaviors during Black Friday. In 2016 for the first time the Black Friday practice was introduced in Greece. Therefore, the purpose of the study was to study the behaviors, attitudes and intentions of Greek consumers towards Black Friday. Moreover, the objective of this research was to understand differences between shoppers on Black Friday and non-shoppers and to suggest how retailers can harness these differences in terms of marketing. The online survey research method was used and data was gathered from 540 consumers. The results of the study show that there was limited knowledge and information among consumers on the Black Friday practice. Moreover, the findings show that only 1/3 of consumer participate in Black Friday sales indicating that Greek consumers did not respond as retailers probably expected. Finally, the reasons for the low participation rates as well as future consumer intentions are presented.

Understanding what specific factors of retail stores’ offering have a positive impact on unplanned buyers’ satisfaction may help store managers target these consumers, especially when international markets experience economic difficulties or recessions. Nevertheless, current knowledge on these factors is still very limited. To close this gap, this research investigated the factors likely to determine unplanned buyers satisfaction in Spain in 2008, at the onset of the last international economic crisis, and 5 years later, when consumers were experiencing this negative economic situation. The results provide some managerial recommendations for bolstering satisfaction with unplanned purchases and responding to consumers’ awareness of international economic crises.

Visual appeal is a pivotal feature in retail strategy. Consumers process the visual presentation of products based upon their ease of processing visual information. Similarly, consumers evaluate products depending on how they interpret the overlap between a target object and its context. Across two studies we demonstrate that product context complexity influences processing fluency and product evaluation. Further, we find that consumers process products high in context complexity less fluent in low congruent shop environments compared to high congruent shop environments. Relevant academic and managerial findings are discussed.

We propose to investigate two specific moderating factors on the effect of celebrity endorsement on product evaluation and consumer purchase intention: the impact of consumer brand familiarity and the congruency between celebrity and product category, across both national brands and private labels. Because familiarity may breed contempt, we propose that the effect of celebrity endorsement will be higher for low familiar versus high familiar brands, and that this effect will be enhanced the higher the level of congruency between the celebrity and the product category. In the present research we study this phenomenon across national brands and private labels, hypothesizing that the impact of celebrity endorsement will be higher for private labels, since consumers exhibit lower levels of certainty about manufacturer origin.

Our hypotheses were tested across two experimental studies. Findings suggest that, for national brands (study 1), the effect of congruency between celebrity and product categories may be mitigated when consumers are highly familiar with the brand. Opposite results were found when celebrities are endorsing PLs (study 2), with findings suggesting a mitigation of product-celebrities congruency effects for low retailer’s brand familiarity.

This research reveals the success rate of new private label products by food category. It also compares the PL results to branded new product. Private label products have a much higher success rate than it has been traditionally estimated in the literature. However, it is slightly lower than that of branded. The data is based on the Global New Product database from Mintel. New product success is defined as if a product is still on sale 2 years after introduction. 28,160 food items were downloaded, and from that list, a sample of the new product introductions from 2010 to 2012 for various food groups was drawn. We randomly selected 10% from each of the food categories using Excel’s random number generator, making it 2816 new products which were sampled from 17 food categories. Overall 43% of new Private Label products were successful, far greater than the 15–20% for all new products. It was however lower than the success rate for branded at 71%, much higher than previous estimates.

Retailers have used celebrity endorsement (CE), an advertising strategy, for several decades to advertise the retailer’s brand or their private labels (PL); however, the emergence of celebrity co-branding (CCOB), a branding strategy, in combination with PL is a relatively new trend worldwide. Evidence from practice indicates that the most successful co-branded premium PL are the ones offering a wide range of products. Apart from superior brand management, this trend might be a result of consumers’ perceived impact of CCOB increasing with the number of products co-branded by the same brand allies. The existing CE, CCOB, and traditional co-branding literature have not yet addressed the effect of multiple applications of any of these strategies on a range of products within the same brand (i.e., celebrity application frequency). However, applying existing findings on the effect of one endorser recommending many different brands to our research context, we hypothesize a negative impact when a spokesperson endorses multiple products within a brand. We propose that consumers perceive CE and CCOB differently when the number of endorsed or co-branded products increases. Indeed, our experiment reveals an interaction between celebrity application type and celebrity application frequency but no main effects. This finding indicates that when either strategy is applied multiple times within the same brand, product evaluations increase in the case of CCOB and decrease in the case of CE.

The paper analyses the role that Premium Private Labels (PPLs) exerts on customer loyalty to the retailer, intended as behavioral and attitudinal. Specifically, the study investigates the mediating role of customer loyalty to the PPL (PPLL), highlighting its main antecedents. The paper contributes to the literature on store brands and customer loyalty in a twofold way. Firstly, it responds to the call for more research on customer loyalty to the retailer as a brand, a topic requiring more empirical evidence compared to store loyalty. Secondly, as many PPLs consist in local products labelled with a PDO/PGI brand too as vehicle to increase the perceived value of this store brand tier, the study would investigate the impact of this brand guarantee on PPLs proneness.

A survey was performed on a sample of retail customers. All the postulated hypotheses were confirmed applying SEM. Willingness to pay an extra price for a PPL product (PPL WP) resulted as the main antecedent of PPLL, followed by PPL perceived quality (PPLQ) and then by the guarantee that the PDO/PGI label offers to PPL buyers (TPG). Residual the effect of PPL Uniqueness (PPLU). Significant and positive resulted the effect of PPLL on both attitudinal and behavioral loyalty to the retailer. Indirect effects were confirmed too.

Actor George Clooney’s ‘What else?’ slogan is arguably the most memorable piece of Nespresso Coffee’s online advertising campaign. Like Clooney, an incredible number of celebrities now endorse a product or brand image. Viewers of the U.S.A.’s Super Bowl can attest to the public’s fondness for humorous ads. This research is a preliminary investigation of how consumers react to a celebrity endorsement in an online humorous ad. The objective of this study is to highlight how humor influences consumer attitude, how it affects the likelihood of an ad going viral, and whether it encourages the consumer to share the ad on social media. Exploratory research provides answers to these questions.

In the current omnichannel retail environment, customers have multiple channels to interact with firms to search for information, purchase, and after-sales. Within those channel social media can play a significant role, particularly as complaint channels. The aim of this paper is to analyze whether the choice to complain face-to-face or through social media depends on the purchase channel chosen and the satisfaction and commitment with the retailer. With data from an online panel our results show that the complaint channel tends to be the same as the channel chosen for purchase; moreover, satisfaction is positively related to complaining at store and negatively related to complaining through social media, and commitment is only positively related to complaining through social media.

Brands and private labels are constantly seeking ways to increase the persuasive power of their webpages on the Internet, especially on handled devices such as mobile phones or tablets. To this end, brands and private labels are encouraged to match the executional elements of their mobile webpages (e.g. visuals such as fonts and layout) with their consumer’s intention to process brand information from webpages. Following this approach, this study examines the effects of the font and layout of the design of mobile phone websites, a potentially critical and under-investigated executional element, on behavioral intentions. A mobile phone website was specifically designed for this study. The research was conducted on French consumers. Through online and personal survey questionnaires, 312 responses were collected. Data was analyzed using ANOVA and linear regression. The findings indicate that not only is ease-of-use capable of affecting consumer ability to process brand information on web pages, but also that the effects of various font characteristics have the potential to significantly influence behavioral intentions. Therefore, font represents a major executional element of word-driven mobile web pages, which should be highly considered when designing websites for mobile devices.

Negative publicity (NP) of a Private Label Brand (PLB) may deteriorate consumers’ buying intention and perceived quality towards the PLB, along with the retailer store’s image. The rising involvement of consumers in the socials networks increases the damage of NP. The research purpose is to examine the influence of relying on extrinsic cues as a moderating factor and value for money (VFM) as a mediating factor on the NP’s final outcome. Survey participants (425) were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups to test the NP, and the moderation and mediation effects. The study employs factor analysis methods and paths analyses, Findings imply a direct negative effect of NP on PLB quality and PLB VFM, while PLB VFM mediates the relationship between PLB buying intention and store image. A moderation effect of extrinsic cues was found between PLB VFM and store chain image. The study contributes to the existing theory by the highlighting the role of extrinsic cues on the NP’s negative impact. Implication for retailers is, that extrinsic cues like price and publicity should be managed using a comprehensive view, especially in the arena of the social networks as a buffer against NP.

The aim of this conceptual paper is to present a selection of the factors affecting purchase of private label products in grocery, integrating the existing literature about private label and purchase motivations. The factors have been chosen by the prevailing literature and by retailers’ experiences synthesized by different secondary data sources. Each of the 13 factors is contextualized to private label products, generating some questions about consumer perceptions and preferences, which represent the core of a research in progress regarding the Spanish, German and Italian market experiences.

The selection of the factors aims at building a model useful to understand the role and the weight of each variable than the other ones and to analyse how the combination between factors change according to different markets, channels, retailers or product categories. The selection implies an integrated and systemic use of the whole list of factors that represents the originality of the paper and could contribute to build future research, searching for answers about the reasons why consumers increasingly buy private label.

Store Brands (SBs) have been growing internationally over the last decades, spurring many managerial and academic studies. The present work aims to take a fresh perspective on SB by highlighting its role as a retail touchpoint within a Customer Experience (CE) framework. This study examines SB as a touchpoint, together with many other retail/store touchpoints that consumers interact with during their CE journeys. By means of a survey on more than 2000 consumers, we identify the relative role of SB within the CE journey in terms of reach, and its contribution to store loyalty when all other CE touchpoints are considered. First, we show that SB is a touchpoint that can reach a high share of retail customers and we highlight its overlap with other touchpoints. Second, considering that touchpoint “positivity” is defined as the customer’s affective response to the encounter with a touchpoint, the study estimates the relative contribution of SB positivity to store loyalty. SB positivity is found to be an important predictor of store loyalty. Results carry several implications for academics and practitioners.

This work analyses how consumers of two different countries—Spain and the U.S.—react to one brand—Private labels (PL)-only assortments—in terms of store-switching intentions. For this purpose we analysed the relationship between three variables—store image, perceived assortment variety and PL purchase intentions—and consumers’ store-switching intentions. To test the hypotheses formulated, we developed an online experiment with a sample of 280 individuals in each country; Structural Equation Models (SEM) have also been used. Results show interesting differences between these countries. In Spain, store-switching intention is diminished when consumers’ perceived assortment variety is high and when they show PL purchase intention. In the U.S., store-switching intention is lower when store image is positive and when consumers’ perceived variety is high.

This paper aims to explain variations in the store brand adoption and penetration with trust. It aims to help both retailers and manufacturers predict store brand purchases through an improved understanding of the impact of trust in store brands across ten different store brand product categories and among different grocery retailers. Data was collected through a telephone survey from 904 participants responsible for the household grocery shopping with a quota of 100 respondents from each of the nine leading grocery retailers in Greece. Data were analyzed through analysis of variance and partial least square path modeling. The findings provide empirical support that store brand purchases are positively influenced by the consumers’ perceived level of trust towards the retailer’s store brands. Results also confirmed variations in store brand adoption and penetration across the ten product categories that were tested, variations among the retailers, and variations in the level of trust. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed and opportunities for future research were identified.

This study reviews the empirical research on the topic of private label consumers published in international journals in the last 20 years (1996–2016). A comprehensive data base of 109 articles was built including information about the journals where they were published, the countries and variables studied. The analysis indicates that Europe and the USA account for more than two thirds of the published studies. There is a high concentration of the publications, since 40% of the papers were published in just four journals, all included in the Scimago Journal Rank. The key consumer characteristics that prior researchers have found to influence private labels’ purchase decision process are also identified and categorized. Based on the statistically significant results obtained by previous research, it can be concluded that perceptual variables mostly influence consumers’ attitude towards private label while psychographic variables tend to have an effect on private label purchase intention. Therefore, future research could be addressed to estimate an empirical model in order to clarify this issue.

We build a model of quality-price competition between a national brand manufacture and a retailer who introduces a private label. The manufacturer decides the wholesale price of his national brand, and the retailer optimizes her combined profit using a product-line pricing. We find that the wholesale price of the national brand is not relevant to the optimal pricing decision of the private label. Instead, the price solely depends on the relative quality of the private label against the national brand. The national brand’s wholesale and retail prices decrease due to the new competition, but its demand level stays the same. The market coverage of the combined demand is twice the initial NB-only demand, and the total channel profit increases as a result.

Research on relational aspects of the distribution channel has been extensively performed but not exhaustively completed. There is room for further research into the retailer capabilities and how its characterization is influenced by external political aspects like the legal framework or internal organizational aspects like the level of functional integration of the channel. This paper focuses on proving the causal relationship between the legal framework, the level of integration and the distributor capabilities by comparing the dynamics of three different distribution channels of the beauty and personal care category in Spain (pharmacies; specialized beauty stores and FMCG retail stores) in order to provide extended models for political/economical dynamics in distribution channel analysis.

The main objective of this study is to develop a framework for supply chain collaboration between manufacturers and retailers, which includes managerial, behavioural and technical issues. It is claimed that collaborative relationships yield significant benefits in areas like the management of both the private label and national brand. However, supply chain collaboration has proved difficult to achieve and one of the reasons is a lack of understanding of the elements that make up supply chain collaboration. An exploratory multiple case study was carried out in the Spanish Fast Moving Consumer Goods industry, examining both retailers and manufacturers from a dyadic approach. From the different elements included in the supply chain collaboration model, the results seem to indicate that the ones used most are related to the design of the collaborative initiative and the behavioural aspects related to inter-organisational relationships (trust and mutuality) and human resources (longevity and informal cross-functional team working).