With 120 Sears and Kmart stores about to be shuttered, the future looks uncertain for yet another iconic US retail brand. Here’s our view on what it might take for Sears Holdings to create a brighter future.

It’s an understatement to say the retail environment has become a slush pile in the past decade. Once a dominant presence in every major mall across the US, Sears is now a relic from the past struggling to find its way in a culture that no longer seems to care.

Same goes for Kmart– these iconic and once beloved brands (like Kodak) appear beyond transforming themselves into something that people will love again.

I remember growing up in the 60’s and shopping at Sears and Kmart with my Mother. She loved shopping in both those stores. Dad too. It seemed to me both these brands represented the idea that the good life was accessible to just about everyone everywhere. My family was no exception. My parents made all their major purchases at a Sears or Kmart store. They wouldn’t consider alternatives.  I grew up with a deep belief that these stores were somehow sacred places for a thriving middle class living the American dream.

Times change, Sears and Kmart didn’t.

Now executives at Sears Holdings find themselves in a scramble to figure out what to do with these brands that have become dinosaurs from a lost world–relics from a time when things were simple and uncomplicated.

Retail knowledge and expertise is not the core problem for Sears– it’s the investment banker management culture that has over time sucked the value out of these brands.

Profit has been placed above serving people with experiences they care about. As I have written in previous posts, iconic brands begin to die long before the cash they generate dries up.

Of course, there are many highly skilled and experienced people within the Sears organization that know the retail business inside and out, with far more depth than I will ever know in a hundred lifetimes. It’s time for the folks at Sears Holdings to transform the brand into something worthy of its heritage and a brighter future.

Sears’ brighter future is in the parts not the whole.

Despite tired merchandising and dingy looking stores, Sears store brands are a shining pot of gold that can pave the way forward to a brighter future. Craftsman, DieHard, Kenmore and Lands End are all highly valued brands that still matter to consumers. Trouble is, one has to go into a crappy Sears stores to buy them.

Maybe a tough decision could be made to sell these coveted brands through other retail channels. According to a recent post on Store Brand Decisions, that may already be happening as there is speculation the retailer may be getting serious about new channel strategies for its legacy hardline private label brands.

According to the post, Sears has made moves to expand its store brands beyond its own stores. Sears recently struck deals to sell Craftsman tools at Costco stores and is expanding this program to include Ace Hardware stores. This past September, Sears announced plans to sell its DieHard Gold auto batteries at Meijer discount stores. However, there have been no announcements about selling Kenmore appliances at other retailers, but there’s plenty of speculation.

That seems like selling off the “seeds” of their brighter future. Indeed it’s a logical short-term strategy for revenue and keeping the stock price up, but these coveted store brands own all the cache! When you can buy them somewhere else, who needs Sears?

Seems to me, reinventing the Sears experience by leveraging the valuable equity in these private brands through more effective and creative merchandising in smaller retail footprints and online is the smarter move. Get rid of everything else–including Kmart. Who needs a Kmart today when Target, Wal-Mart and a host of other discount retailers have that space covered in spades.

Create experiences people love.

The entire Sears customer experience must be purposefully reinvented and designed.  This is what IKEA accomplished. Despite the fact that people hate shopping for furniture, IKEA reinvented the entire furniture shopping experience–and did it in a manner that’s contrary to the conventional wisdom about furniture retailing.

Unlike most furniture retailers, IKEA does not deliver, and you have to set-up your stuff once you cart it home. And despite all this hassle, people love IKEA. It is one of the most beloved retail brands. People don’t buy furniture at IKEA they buy into an idea, an ethos, a certain way of living.

Sears could learn a thing or two about the value of designed experiences to differentiate itself from other big box competitors. To do this will require a tremendous culture shift within the ranks of executive management.  To people concerned more about short-term profits, it’s far easier to close down non-performing stores than create ones people love to shop in.

Leverage the iconic Sears mail-order heritage into a richer digital experience.

Back in the day when people cared about Sears, they also loved the Sears Catalog. Sears invented the mail order catalog. With online retailing now common, Sears seemingly missed the boat translating their iconic catalog into a rich online experience consumers crave today.

On the current site, there are over two dozen product categories offered with thousands of items. You can buy everything imaginable. Why?  Why not focus the Sears online shopping experience around the valuable and much loved store brands. Leave everything else to Amazon who does a much better job.

Online, Sears is a me-too generic site. If people don’t shop in your brick and mortar stores that represent an experience they love, why would they shop online in the face of other more capable alternatives?  If you visit the site, there is no visual merchandising of the beloved trade names, only generic descriptors like “refrigerator” or “washers and dryers”. You have to really dive deep to find the brand name Kenmore. In the desire to sell everything under the sun, Sears no longer means anything to anybody.  In the online world, Sears should leverage its mail order heritage and be the exception not the rule.

Focus and the art of sacrifice.

The toughest thing for an iconic brand to do is focus and sacrifice. To thrive, Sears must do both. Sears needs to focus on a compelling positioning that sacrifices a “be all things to all people” business with gigantic scale, and transform itself into a business that offers a highly relevant value proposition narrowly targeted to select high value customers.

Less is more. Put the marketing and merchandising focus on the much loved store brands. Get rid of all the other the soft lines. Retire or sell the Kmart brand.  Design a compelling retail experience in smaller footprint stores. Reinvent the online experience. Target higher value customers.

Can they pull it off? Time will tell.

Let’s pay respects to Eastman Kodak which appears to be rapidly fading into black, the victim of it’s own arrogance and the forces of creative destruction raging in our digital age.

As I write this post, I can’t help singing the lyrics of Paul Simon’s 1973 iconic tune: “Kodachrome gives us our life’s bright colors, give us the greens of summer, make us feel all the world’s a brighter day”.

Once the bluest of blue chip brands, Kodak is eminently about to enter some form of bankruptcy protection and reorganization. Of course, no surprise there, but as the Holiday Season draws near, I am nostalgically reminded of Kodak’s “open-me-first” dominance of the season and all the special “Kodak moments” throughout the year that were the foundation of its dominant position in our culture for over a century.

This is a dramatic ending to an iconic and beloved brand that was once as globally recognized as Coca-Cola.

With it’s stock price hovering around a buck, $800 million in cash on hand, and a monthly burn rate of $70 million, it’ll take less than a year for Kodak (like Polaroid) to become a history lesson for marketing MBA’s to ponder in business schools. Kodak is now frantically trying to stay afloat by selling its intellectual property. Buggy whips anyone?

The irony of the digital age.
Some people may not be aware that in 1975 Kodak engineers invented the digital camera. But like many innovations, the idea was not deemed particular useful by the management of a company deeply cemented into it’s dominant chemistry based film business.  The irony is palpable for sure–made worse by the arrogance of Kodak’s executive management over the years.

The last spool of Kodachrome film rolled out of a Mexican factory in 2009. With instant point and shoot digital photography on cheap cell phone cameras, even consumer-grade digital cameras are quickly becoming relics. Worse, only a tiny fraction of consumer images taken on cell phones or digital cameras gets printed to paper. Who needs printed pictures when people share digital photos on social media networks?

New economic models and global competition have destroyed other giant companies, but digital technology has been a destructive firestorm making every aspect of Kodak’s business completely irrelevant. I can think of no better example of Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” principle at work.

The arrogance of success.
Kodak is a lesson to any CEO in an industry dominant company– things change, nothing lasts forever. (This goes for the likes of Apple, Google and Facebook). Almost from it’s founding in 1890, the money came rolling in decade after decade fueled by the razor-blade strategy of selling cheap cameras and reaping lavish profit margins through consumables of film, chemistry and paper.

By the mid-70’s Kodak owned nearly 90 percent of the film and camera market. With this level of dominance, you can just imagine what kind of executive culture was brewing in the Petri dish of marketplace success. Arrogance and complacency are often the by-products of an unassailable competitive position, and Kodak has been no exception.

When Fuji Film entered the US market, Kodak executives refused to believe that Americans would embrace a foreigner over the sacred brand. Big mistake. Rebuffing its chance to become the official film of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, Fuji brilliantly exploited the opportunity and achieved a permanent hold in the US market, significantly eroding Kodak’s share.

Then came the digital age. Although Kodak had embraced many me-too digital features in its products by the mid-80’s, it’s executives could not fathom a future where film would have no role whatsoever in image capture. Nor could they manage their bloated business, pension obligations and executive compensation on the low profit margins and competitive pace of a marketplace overflowing with short product cycle technologies.

The Kodak Moment has passed.
Every brand has a lifespan– a beginning, middle and an end.  That said, companies can remake themselves on a scale now confronting Kodak. IBM did it. GM is on that road now. It can be done.  Alas, we may be witnessing the last Kodak Moment right now.

True enough, it could be argued it’s premature to write off the Kodak brand. Kodak has a century of consumer marketing expertise and a viable technology portfolio to leverage. However, without visionary leadership at this critical time, Kodak may be forced to sell the remaining seeds of its potentially brighter future and fade into black.

In a world of ubiquitous choice in every product category, brands no longer compete with each other rather they seem to be melting into each other. It’s time to rethink different in a world predisposed to sameness.

In category after category, the more brands strive for differentiation, the more alike they become. This is the paradox of different. Never in the course of human history has there been more abundant choice and consumption.  There are more upgrades, add-ons, flavors and features between brands in a category that many have become indistinguishable in consumer’s minds.

The rise of the category connoisseur.
In her provocative and quirky book “Different–Escaping the Competitive Herd”, Harvard Business School professor Youngme Moon describes how consumers navigate product categories and discern differences among brands within categories. She uses (to great effect) a low involvement category like breakfast cereal to illustrate the process. According to Moon, it goes something like this:

You’re standing in the middle of the breakfast cereal isle in your local grocery store. Your mission is to select a cereal you’ve never tried before–ideally one you will end up enjoying. How would you go about it?

If you were a breakfast cereal category connoisseur, you would simply walk down the isle instantly eliminating whole batches of cereal types from your consideration– kid’s cereals or anything with lots of sugar. You might begin to narrow your focus down to granolas or high fiber cereals. Maybe you would eliminate raisons or walnuts from the mix. Until you make your selection. The whole exercise would be over in less than a minute.

Consumers have learned to deconstruct a product category into sub categories and mini categories. Consumers, faced with overwhelming choice, have learned to make distinctions between various brands based on the smallest details of difference, and along the way become category connoisseurs. Before consumers can discern brand differences, they must be highly involved in the category.

On the other hand, if you were an alien from another planet, this simple task would prove nearly impossible. For this poor soul, ALL the cereals would appear to be pretty much the same. Why? Because where a connoisseur (category aware consumer) sees differences, the novice (unaware consumer) sees similarity. According to Moon, “connoisseurs can discern subtle differences based on nuanced asymmetries”, while a novice will lack the necessary filters to organize the assortment of choices in a relevant or meaningful way.

You could repeat this same exercise in any number of product categories with the same result. Try explaining to our aforementioned alien friend the difference between a Honda and a Toyota?  AT&T Wireless and Verizon? Wendy’s and Burger King?  Coke and Pepsi, Crest and Colgate?

Yet as consumers, we take for granted how frequently we make purchase decisions among brands in the face of mind boggling, overflowing product choice. For brands competing in a category, this reality has critical implications–especially in mature product categories where the number of alternatives has grown exponentially.

It’s a mistake to assume product proliferation within the category translates into product diversity. As the number of products grows in a category, the differences between them become trivial, almost meaningless.

The emperor has no clothes and everybody knows it.
The whole point of an effective brand strategy is to create relevant competitive advantage in a category. This is accomplished by having a value proposition that is highly valued and not in abundant supply. Yet with so much choice, it’s difficult to name a brand in any category that stands out for its uniqueness.

We now live in a brand landscape of dissimilar clones where imitation has become cloaked in the disguise of differentiation. Marketers still believe in the myth of competitive separation and advantage by function, features and rational benefits. They continue to imitate rather than innovate.

Meaningful differentiation is a breakaway from conventional wisdom.
Over time, consumer’s consumption patterns dictate the conventional wisdom of the category and what defines the functional reach of the products within that category. It’s easy to see why brands that fit neatly into the consumption pattern blend into the category. Thus contributing to the trivial differentiation that eventually becomes imitation.

To break free of the defining norms and innovate new meanings, brands have to breakaway and provide consumers with an expanded view or alternate frame of reference.

Breaking away means letting go of the consumption pattern embedded into the category. Consumers must be complicit in this process for the magic to work.

A great example of a breakaway brand is Cirque du Soleil.  It falls into the “circus” category, but this brand has skillfully crafted a highly valued and differentiated positioning as everything a circus is not. There are no tents, tigers and elephants. No ringmasters. Instead it borrows attributes from other entertainment categories like, dance, music, opera and theater.  It becomes something all together different–far outside the bounds of a conventional circus.

Breakaway brands bring new meanings to the party and make the most of the stretch, holding on to enough of the conventinal wisdom to avoid category defection. Breakaway brands stretch these boundaries and live as outliers. These brands are the opposite of the well-behaved brands in the category and consequently provide a radical differentiation from the status quo.

Breakaway brands challenge the conventional patterns of consumption in the category by proposing new patterns to consumers they would not normally apply in that specific context. In essence, these brands provide the very thing consumers were waiting for, just not asking for.

To break the paradox of different, brands become the exception in their category and not the rule.

Contrary to what many believe, the logo is still the main event in communicating the essence of what a brand represents. Within our obsessively condensed attention spans, the logo is more important than ever.

Make no mistake, logos are ubiquitous and so are their creators. In an era of $100 logo design and crowd sourcing, one might conclude the discipline of logo creation has been reduced to automated assemblies of database centered type fonts, symbols, icons and pictograms. Seemingly, anyone with a flair for color and arrangement ought to be able to cobble together a decent logo.

Many big name brands have recently tweaked their logos in a crowd-sourced craze to connect with their customers (think Gap and JC Penney). Seemingly brand owners have devalued the importance of their logos through their adoption of these online easy-do-it yourself-generic-creativity-generating portals.  As a result, web sites like HP’s Logoworks have become thriving businesses.

On the other hand…

Creating a logo that brings enduring value and differentiation to the business enterprise it represents requires deep insight and highly specialized talent and skill.

As our world gets smaller through the technology advances in how humans interact and communicate, logos that are instantly recognized and clearly understood are more important and more valuable than ever.

The logo must work so much harder today–especially when compressed down to sixteen pixels favicons, used as buttons, links, or embedded in content on a mobile screen. The space is getting smaller and the white noise in the slush pile of the marketplace is getting louder. Truly effective logo design is being pushed to new limits delivering instant recognition in ever-smaller digital footprints.  Beyond the communication idea, these are important design considerations many brand owners are just beginning to realize and evolve their identities with the times.

And more importantly, when a logo can transcend any language, linguistic or cultural barrier, and still represent a compelling brand story, its value to brand owners increases exponentially.

What Paul Rand said about the importance of the logo three decades ago still holds true today: “If, in the business of communication, image is king, the essence of this image, the logo, is the jewel in its crown”.

Logos have always been an abbreviation for our preferences, and symbolic of the value that defines who we are and what we promise. For centuries, logo forms have been stitched into the visual fabric that surrounds and connects us. The logo and the ideals it represents are more important than ever–and so is the discipline and process of creating them.

In many conversations with my client colleagues over the past year, hands down, the most important brand building challenges they say they’ll face in the coming year will be vision, innovation, and alignment.

No doubt, the stakes for marketplace success are growing ever higher for marketers. Consumers have more choice than their mind’s can process. Against the backdrop of a dicey economy, over-crowded retail channels, and price pressure driving nearly every decision these days, marketers are neck deep and choking on more short-term marketing tactics to sell more stuff.

Few are granted the luxury of stepping back and making big picture assessments with clarity and confidence that the future they are busy creating will matter to anyone by time they get there. Brand building is like riding a bullet train these days. It’s easy to feel like your being left behind. Regardless, I believe it’s a good idea to be looking up and out right now.

In listening to my client colleague’s conversations, here’s my take on what may be the most important areas of focus for many marketing decision-makers and brand managers to pursue their best opportunities this coming year.

Vision

The global economic reset will continue to slowly shake itself out. As a result, more brand managers (with enlightened management) will recognize the value of crafting a bigger, more compelling vision for their brand’s future. A future that will be rich in opportunity for those brands that truly know who they are, what they represent, where they’re going from here, and why they will matter to people.  Vision is everything! Everything that ever was, is now, or ever will be, begins with a compelling vision.

How clear is your vision looking out onto the horizon of opportunity right now?

Innovation

The marketplace is a vast slush pile– with more slush added daily. The brands that will be rewarded with existence will be the ones that continue to innovate better ways to be of value and serve people. This is where the real game is played.  Innovations, both incremental and disruptive, are happening at light speed in every product and service category. There’s simply no room left anymore for me-too anything. More marketers will be putting their creative energies into innovating highly valued “meanings” for their offerings, rather than adding more competitive features and benefits– and in the process, create whole new markets.

Where do you see your best opportunity to change the game?

Alignment

By now, most consumers are online. Increasingly, paid media messaging is less about awareness and more about engagement online. To genuinely connect with people there, the web has ever-evolving rules of engagement. Rule number one is you can’t control the message. Rule number two is you have to be invited. It will be a continuing challenge for brand managers to align their brand vision and product innovations to stay relevant and highly valued by people. It is an  understatement to say the social web is a sea change of profound magnitude for marketers. Brands must provide intrinsic value to people first, and the social web is the perfect venue for doing this. Brand managers who successfully connect the dots and add to the collective good in their customer’s lives will dominate. Being authentic, honest, and trustworthy–is how the marketing gets baked in these days. Paraphrasing Seth Godin, “ideas have to ship” for your value to matter to people.

How aligned is the quality of your presence to your vision for a bigger future?

Of course, brand managers will continue to experience much more pressure to deliver on short-term results. Unfortunately, that’s not changing. This will suck up their creative bandwidth that otherwise might be directed to creating ideas that enable new demand rather than chasing what’s already out there.

Enlightened marketers will focus more on creating, rather than competing for what has already been created.

As the “new normal” settles in, and the consumer economy begins to warm up a little in the coming year, marketers have a perfect opportunity to renew their vision, bring new innovations of meaning to the marketplace, and align the quality of their presence in the minds of highly devoted people.

How important is vision, innovation and alignment creating influence and growth to your business?

New and fresh ideas usually come from an awareness of new opportunities in the marketplace. It can be challenging for iconic brands to take advantage of new opportunity and remain relevant to people. Iconic brands tend to lose their relevance long before the cash they generate begins to dry up. Once they lose their luster, iconic cash cow brands are nearly impossible to change.

Consider the fate of these iconic brands that held on to their heritage at the expense of innovating a bigger future:

Sears: once the dominant leader in the mail order business, now an “also-ran” against big box retailers. Their relevance lost by disruptive technologies. The very principles of “mail order” that made Sears a great iconic brand, were reinvented by Amazon. The rest is history.

Newsweek: Once the biggest news magazine by circulation in America. Now diminished by lost circulation and advertising revenue, it has finally been sold to a digitally savvy internet competitor.

Chevrolet: No brand was more iconic and embedded into the fabric of 20th century American culture. The problem is we are now in the 21st century and the game has changed. Chevy’s current advertising manta “runs deep” is a gallant attempt to reinvent itself by looking to the past. Good luck with that one. Most people seem to be paying more attention to forward-thinking Hyundai these days.

Xerox: It invented laser printing but held tightly to it’s dominant document company positioning while HP exploited the technology and became the industry leader.

Kodak: It invented digital photography, but cemented itself into it’s dying film business.

The most successful companies are the ones who have no problem killing their cash cow brands.

Apple has done this over and over again. Killing cash cow product brands has been the hallmark of every Apple product innovation since the Macintosh. True enough, Apple is an easy benchmark to make the point, yet there are other marketers who routinely reinvent, reposition and realign their brand innovations at the expense of their most sacred cash cow brands.

Gillette is another great example–first killing its highly successful single-edge razor blades in favor of the TRAC II, then killing that with another innovation– the adjustable twin blade Atra brand.

Jaguar has reinvented itself–emerged from the chrome and glass shackles of the Ford culture– completely re-styling its entire product line and successfully leveraging the most transcendent attributes of it’s long heritage. But it was an expensive transition for the new owners.

What gets you there won’t keep you there.
The marketplace moves too rapidly to rely on the momentum of scale and history. There is simply too much choice today. Evolving the meaning of an iconic brand is a tricky business. Along the way it’s easy to blur the brand’s identity and it’s value proposition attempting to fit what worked in the past into what’s going on today. Managers of iconic brands are naturally boxed in by the heritage the brand represents in people’s minds. When heritage represents “old and tired”, it’s nearly impossible to change that perception in people’s minds.

To change or not to change–that is the question.
Should every iconic brand be forced to change with the times? Not exactly. White Castle Hamburgers has been around since the 1920’s. Their identity, store décor and menu have been pretty much the same since the beginning. White Castle is indeed an iconic brand, yet it is far from old and tired. As the burger category evolved around them, White Castle kept doing what they do best. The result–next to McDonald’s, they have the highest sales per store unit in the category. Why is this? The answer may lie in the fact that White Castle did not pursue growth for its own sake. White Castle kept its focus on serving its customers in ways customers have highly valued for over 70 years– growth was not the driver of brand value.

Making the transition from a dying market to an emerging one.
When an iconic brand is “locked in” by it’s heritage, brand owners and managers may find themselves in a similar fix as the aforementioned Sears-its iconic heritage blurred by the “softer side of Sears” and now the brand is limping into the sunset meaning very little to anyone. Sears could well have leveraged its original mail-order heritage to the online world and become the dominant online retailer. Of course, that prize went to Amazon.

According to Marty Neumeier, author of ZAG, iconic brands make the leap to new relevance only when they focus on the two-stage rocket strategy–essentially leveraging the cash generating strength of the iconic brand to fuel the innovation of a new brand. Killing the cash cow, as the second stage rocket of the new brand takes full advantage of the momentum of the first, can take a long time–certainly longer than a quarter or two.

Brand managers with enlighted management and the intestinal fortitude to stay the course, can leverage their iconic brands and pave the way for newer and more relevant expressions of the original value that people continue to care about. With all the revenue pressures facing marketers today, the difficulty is knowing when to fire the second stage rocket before the fuel of the first is at last spent.

Your comments are encouraged!

Consumers are definitely giving retailers permission to grow their private brands.  The real question is will retailers grow private brand value or simply grow more private labels?  In the age of mega-private brands, this trend is giving national CPG brand managers some added anxiety these days.  It also presents some relationship challenges for retailers to grow the value trusted CPG brands bring to their customers.

According to a report published this past year by consulting firm Deloitte, consumer’s perceptions and attitudes toward private brands are changing significantly; and offers insight into the notion that spending less for private brands doesn’t mean consumers are settling for less from private brands. According to the report, only one-third of the respondents endorsed the statement “ I often feel that I am sacrificing when I purchase a store brand instead of a national brand”. This is no surprise when one stops to think that many consumers today believe that store brands and national brand are essentially made of the same stuff. According to the report, 80 percent believe the statement “most store brands are manufactured by the national brands”.

The report further suggests that the current economic climate has made consumers more discerning about the brands they prefer. 75 percent of respondents agreed “ these economic times have made me more aware of which brands I care about and which ones are less important to me”.

Who’s winning?
Seemingly one could easily conclude that private brands are beginning to win the battle of the brands through market share gains over the national brands. What’s accelerating this trend is private store brands are beginning to employ more strategic product innovation and the brand management discipline commonly employed by big national CPG brands. Consumers now believe there is little difference in quality or value between the two alternatives. Worse, many consumers believe they’re paying for the “advertising” of the higher priced national brands. Here are some more interesting highlights from the report:

Between 2006 and 2009, private brand market share rose across 74 percent of products in the personal care, household goods and food and beverage categories in the United States.

In 2009, store brands represented nearly 18 percent of CPG spending and over 23 percent of CPG products sold.

Private labels represent 20 percent of grocery store and 18 percent of supercenter sales.

Store brand products were 31 percent cheaper across product categories than their national brand counterparts.

Store brands are not just a recession related phenomenon – U.S. store brand sales continue to grow over the long run despite improving economic conditions.

Retailers are now taking product and brand building innovation to heart.
What’s driving innovation within private brand-driven retailers is fairly simple–they can be far more nimble than national CPG brands. Developing a private brand can be far more efficient and at a much faster pace.  Private brands don’t have to make the long-term capital investments in product development, manufacturing and rigorous BASES testing and other quantitative research methods to gain the assurance that their value proposition is relevant and the long-term investment warranted. Private brands have the real-time retail environment to test brand concepts with far less risk, and they receive immediate feedback because their customer’s are voting with their dollars right in the store!

Walmart’s Great Value brand is a case in point on being nimble and innovative in near real-time. Covering well over 100 product categories, and launched in 2009, the Great Value brand continues to adapt and transform itself much faster than CPG brands of similar scale.  The Great Value private brand was so expansive and compelling at shelf, customers began to believe they were being driven to favor the value brand over national brand alternatives. At the risk of alienating customers and CPG suppliers, Walmart correctly and quickly balanced their “brand block” private brand presentation in a fashion that did not  obscure the shelf presence of national brands–thus the power of a mega-private brand.

Private brands will lead the way.
It’s probably safe to conclude the next generation of super successful brands will not come from the name brands, but from more private brand-focused retailers. Consumers seeking to save some money in tough times may be fueling the current growth in private brands, however the cat is out of the bag, and progressive retailers will continue to innovate and leverage to the fullest advantage their immediate access to their customers.

Editors Note: I gathered much of the research for this post from the blog: My Private Brand. I encourage you check the site out and subscribe to the feed. It offers useful insights into the emerging trends surrounding the global growth and advancement of Private Brands.