To what extent do women align private label store brands with specific retailers? 
Private label brands, such as Wal-Mart’s Equate and Target’s Up & Up are stealing market share from nationally advertised brands across apparel, food, and general merchandise, and in virtually all distribution channels.
Yet it appears that women have a hard time matching the private label brand with the retailer that carries it, according to “Women’s Retail Brand Awareness: Private Label Fashion, Food & Storewide Brands,” a proprietary study of 305 women shoppers in the United States conducted by EPM Communications, the parent company of Marketing to Women.
The ability of women to correctly identify which store brands are sold by which retailers varies widely based on a variety of factors:
• Across 46 store brands surveyed, 23 of which are licensed, women accurately say which brand appears in which store, on average, 20% of the time. They think they know the matchup but are wrong 20% of the time. And 60% of the time they say they don’t know. (See charts for more survey data).
• The frequency with which women shop a retailer also significantly affects their awareness of that retailer’s brands. Virtually across the board, the more often a woman shops a retailer, the more likely she is able to recall that retailer’s brands. Food brands in particular benefit from this trend, as women shop for food more often than they do apparel, housewares, electronics, and other categories. In general, awareness of a brand drops by more than a third among those who shop every two to three months compared to those who shop every month. It drops by 60% comparing those who shop every six months or less frequently to those who shop monthly or more often.
• Among licensed brands, confusion increases (and the number of women who can correctly identify which store brand is sold where declines) for store brands that are offshoots of recognized national brands widely available in other channels. Examples include: C9 By Champion (exclusive to Target), Danskin Now (Wal-Mart), Converse One-Star (Target), and Fisher-Price Apparel (Kmart).
• Licensed celebrity store brands are correctly identified with the proper retailer far more frequently if the celebrity is clearly identified in the brand name. Daisy Fuentes (Kohl’s) and Jessica Simpson (distributed beyond Macy’s, but with Simpson featured by that chain as a spokesperson) are far more likely to be associated with the stores where they are sold than Bootheel Trading (Sheryl Crow at Dillard’s) or Abbey Dawn (Avril Lavigne at Kohl’s).
• More than four in 10 women say that the presence of a brand exclusively at one retailer increases how often they shop at that store and how likely they are to recommend it to friends and family; a third say the presence of an exclusive brand will increase the amount they spend at that store.
Source: “Women’s Retail Brand Awareness: A Survey Of Private Label Fashion, Food, and Cross-Category Brands,” EPM Communications, Ira Mayer, Publisher, 19 W. 21st St., 3rd Fl., New York, NY 10010; 212-941-1633, x27; imayer@epmcom.com; www.epmcom.com. Price: $249 for EPM subscribers, $299 for non-subscribers.
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