It’s obvious that brands and companies are doing everything possible to figure out how they can maintain sales in this tough economy. As mentioned, in this weekend’s NY Times: Store Brands Lift Grocers in Troubled Times, the Kroger supermarket chain, as well as several other chains have figured out a way to do so by using branding and design to promote and drive private label sales. By taking every day product purchases, ranging from cereals, to foils, to dairy products, and then branding them, in most cases in a very non-assuming manor with the store name, they are then able to increase in-store sales and pass the cost savings to the consumer.

The opportunity here is that the store chain is able to control the perception of these products. For the most part, the private label and national brands are identical in terms of ingredients or type of product. The store brand design incorporates imagery that has either the same appetite appeal, usage example, or target relevance imagery. For example a kid’s cereal that is more character focused or driven. The suppliers of these physical products are either the big brands themselves who sell to private label brands or smaller suppliers who are unknown to the consumer, but are specific suppliers to the store based brands.

Once you factor design into this, you can then skew it to look either more generic, borrow similar attributes as the leading consumer brand, or push the design to feel a bit more premium. Thereby, controlling the price to reflect each position, that is still economically in favor of the private label. This is a big departure from many years ago when private or no frills meant a bland white or ultra-simplistic design than conveyed cheap by both price and appearance. Private label within supermarkets or even some big box retailers such as Costco, are designing these private label products to be more strategic to the target and competitive in price. Sometimes even smarter visually, by being harder to distinguish against the leading consumer brand.

With consumers looking for value without a sacrificing taste and quality, more and more purchases seem to be heading this way. Now that consumer’s are actually judging a book by its cover and by its price. For more information, visit www.scheinerinc.com