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What is a store brand, and why do many of them imitate national brand packaging? Explain the effects social, marketing, situational, and psychological influences on consumer decision-making. Discuss ethical considerations relevant to this type of imitation.
Michael Burgoyne
Dec 14, 2023, 10:43 AM
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Hello Professor and Class,
Definition of Store Brand and why they imitate national brand packaging.
Store brands are also known as house brands, private brands, and private labels. Anyone that has shopped at a major grocery store chain has seen items like macaroni and cheese, soft drinks, milk, clothing, personal hygiene products like razors, medicines like pain relievers and cough medicines and paper products being sold side by side with a national or regional brand (Mahmoud, 2023). There is no distributor or wholesaler between the manufacturer and the retailer allowing products to be sold at lower prices to consumers.
Common examples of this are Kirkland Signature brands at Costco, Gold Emblem at CVS, and Great Value at Walmart. This article featured an example of baby wipes under the Store Brand Kirkland Signature (Costco) and Pampers (Proctor & Gamble). You can only find Kirkland at Costco, but you will find Pampers at almost every major retail outlet that sells this type of product.
By imitating the national brand and their packaging while offering the product at a lower price, Costco can pass savings to their customers without a negative impact on their margins. This makes it a win-win for the consumer but not for the national brand that created the product in the first place. It used to be that these store brands were known as generic, brandless or no-label products but this had bad stigmas of both value and quality (Kazarian, 2018). Now by imitating the national brand packaging the store brand can leverage familiarity with the established brand and the trust that comes with it. This allows the store brand to gain visibility and appeal and a sense that it is comparable to the national brand for value and quality.
Effects of social, marketing, situational and psychological influences on decision-making.
With social media today there are even more influences and influencers on consumer decision-making. Social influences include family and friends, culture and society and social media. Marketing influences are brand image, product placement and packaging, and advertising and promotions. Situational influences are economics, time and convenience and the physical layout of the shopping environment. And psychological includes focusing on motivation and needs, learning and experience and perception and attitudes (Peek, 2023).
Think about marketing for gym memberships, weight-loss, and other resolution-based buying choices and how situational marketing plays into it. Or the situation where the gas station is right off the interstate with gas that is very expensive, but it is convenient which effects a decision that might otherwise not be made in relation to price and value. Our text talks about chocolate milk being repositioned to appeal to adults which is a combination of marketing product placement and the psychological influence of perception and attitude that this product is for adults (Kerin & Hartley, 2022).
Ethical considerations of brand imitation.
I think there are several ethical considerations where a store brand imitates the packaging of the national brand it is trying to gain market share from. They include brand dilution, market fairness, consumer confusion, potential violation of Intellectual Property rights and what could be referred to as unethical imitation. National brands spend a great deal of money on advertising, brand creation, brand loyalty and so forth. A store brand that appears so close to the national brand that causes consumer confusion probably crosses the line on all these concerns. I know I have gotten home thinking I had bought a national brand only to see that it was a house brand with very similar packaging that I didn’t catch while in the store. Some store brands create their own brand loyalty and are innovative and distinctive like Trader Joes and Whole Foods (Kazarian, 2018) and there is no packaging imitation required for them to gain market share over the larger national brands. This seems like ethical competition and consistent with Conscious Capitalism. Some of the brand imitations don’t seem to meet the stakeholder orientation tenant since the national brand selling in their store is one of their stakeholders and they are intentionally imitating their packaging to reduce the national brand’s market share.
Thanks for reading,
Michael Burgoyne
References:
Kazarian, K. (2018, December 12). The truth about private label brands. packagingstrategies.com. https://www.packagingstrategies.com/articles/90855…
Kerin, R., and Hartley, S. (2022). Marketing: The core (9th ed.). McGraw Hill. ISBN-13: 9781260729184
Mahmoud, R. (2023, March 17). Store Brand Definition & Examples. Retail Dogma. https://www.retaildogma.com/store-brand/#:~:text=A%20store%20brand%20is%20a
Peek, S. (2023, February 21). The 6 Principles of Influencing Consumer Decisions. businessnewsdaily.com. https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/10151-how-to-inf…
