Marketing Management, 16th Edition

Managing Private Labels

A private label (also called a reseller, store, or house brand) is a proprietary brand that retailers and wholesalers develop. Benetton, The Body Shop, and Marks & Spencer carry mostly own-brand merchandise. In grocery stores in Europe and Canada, store brands account for as much as 40 percent of the items sold. In Britain, roughly half of what Sainsbury’s and Tesco, the largest food chains, sell is store-label goods. Germany and Spain are also European markets with a high percentage of private-label sales.

For many manufacturers, retailers are both collaborators and competitors. According to the Private Label Manufacturers’ Association, store brands now account for one of every five items sold in U.S. supermarkets, drug ...