Retailer brands - heaven or hell, opportunity or threat
Oliver Koll and Richard HerbertEuropanel, United Kingdom
BACKGROUND
In late 2001, together with P&G and our academic partner, Professor Jan-Benedict Steenkamp of the University of Tilburg, we were finalising several stages of work on turning Rogers' Diffusion Theory into marketing practice within FMCG (M. Aboul-Fath, R. Herbert, “Research Can be Innovative Too”, Esomar Congress 2002). One factor with a strong impact on diffusion within a category was the presence and size of Retailer Brands (we will use the terms Retailer Brands and Private Labels interchangeably). This, coupled with...