First Insights on Brand Attitude Towards a Retailer’s Individual Private Labels

Excerpt

Private labels (PL), i.e., brands owned by retailers, have developed remarkably over the last decades. Initially, they were lower quality alternatives to national brands (NB) and competed primarily on price. Nowadays PL are often offered in multiple quality tiers, such as economy, standard, and premium (Geyskens et al. 2010), and can be of higher subjective and objective quality than NB. In some countries, PL are even more innovative than NB (Dekimpe and Geyskens 2019). Researchers agree that PL are actually brands (Kumar and Steenkamp 2007). Yet, many retailers and researchers still handle PL differently from NB. From an academic perspective, PL advertising and brand management are under-researched (Ailawadi and Keller, 2004; Dekimpe and Geyskens 2019; Sethuraman and Gielens 2014; Wu et al. 2021). …