Private Label Strategy: How to Meet the Store Brand Challenge

As retailers have become more powerful and global, they have increasingly focused on their own brands at the expense of manufacturer brands. Rather than simply selling on price, retailers have transformed private labels into brands. Consequently, manufacturers such as Johnson & Johnson, Nestle, and Procter & Gamble now compete with their largest customers: major retail chains like Carrefour, CVS, Tesco, and Wal-Mart. 

The growth in private labels has huge implications for managers on both sides. Yet, brand manufacturers still cling to their outdated assumptions about private labels. 

In "Private Label Strategy: How to Meet the Store Brand Challenge," Nirmalya Kumar and Jan-Benedict E.M. Steenkamp describe the new strategies for private labels that retailers are using, and challenge brand manufacturers to develop an effective response. Most important, they lay out actionable strategies for competing against--or collaborating with--private label purveyors. Packed with detailed international case studies, valuable visuals, and hands-on tools, Private Labels enables managers to navigate profitably in this radically altered landscape.

About the Author

Nirmalya Kumar (Winner: 2011 Thinkers50 Global Village Award) is a professor of marketing at London Business School, where he is also co-director of the Aditya Birla India Center. His work focuses on marketing and the rise of India as an economic force.Kumar is the author of several books. Marketing as Strategy: Understanding the CEO’s Agenda for Driving Growth and Innovation (2004); Global Marketing (2005); and Private Label Strategy: How to Meet the Store Brand Challenge (2007), focused on marketing strategy, where Kumar is also credited with introducing the concept of "3Vs": valued customer, value proposition and value network.More recently, he has written about India and its rise to economic superpower status. In India's Global Powerhouses: How They Are Taking on the World (2009), Kumar provides an insider's guide to doing business with Indian leaders and companies.His latest book is India Inside: The Emerging Innovation Challenge to the West, written with London Business School colleague Phanish Puranam (2011). A keen collector of the work of Indian artist Jamini Roy, Kumar is said to have the largest collection of Roy paintings outside of India.