What is Happening with Own Brands

What is happening with own Brands?

What is happening with own Brands? If you have your own brand you’d be smart to understand what everyone else is up to. With supermarkets and alike reducing the number of brands on their shelves in favour of their own brands, consumer choice is becoming limited. This is most likely an experience we all share, but are you aware just how far own branding is going? It’s not just the likes of Tesco’s own brands such as; Tesco Value, Tesco’s Own and Tesco Signature. There’s so much more happening behind the scenes when it comes to branding.

As a brand owner, here’s a few snippets you may find interesting:

The Retailers & Branding

Supermarkets also have their own unique set of brands. These are no doubt based on top selling products from their sales analysis. For example, take a look at Boots own No 7 range and its own branding

Amazon’s at it too and on a much larger scale. All that hard work resellers have put in to finding unique products to sell through Amazon’s platform may well result in Amazon creating their own brand and acquiring a chunk of those resellers sales. Brands you may already be familiar with are: Amazon Basics and Amazon Essentials. However, they’ve cast their net much wider with other brands including: Presto (health & household), Kid Nation (Kids clothing), Mama Bear (Baby range). If you want to see the whole list ‘recode’ have done a great summary, check it out here.

Holland & Barrett

Holland & Barrett have been reducing Brands on shelf in favour of their own brand for years. A significant number of products on shelf are now branded Holland & Barrett. Sadly, this limits ‘quality’ available in store as it does with supermarkets.

The Distributors

Distributors are on it too and are beginning to sell a portfolio of own brands. For a plethora of reasons. Here’s our top three:

1. Through frustration of dealing with a brand who continuously has issues with supply, otherwise they probably wouldn’t have even considered it!
2. Able to sell their own product and make greater margin…which is always very incentivising.
3. Brands streamlining their supply process too much resulting in lack of staff and therefore only concentrating on large accounts, which not every distributer has access to.

Brand owners

So, what’s next for brands? Brands have started setting up their own websites and selling other brands as well. This means there’s no ‘ceiling’ on the amount of products a brand can sell, or revenue a brand can make by restricting itself to its own lines. We are seeing this happen much more often.

The Power of Branding – What is happening with own Brands?

Have your own brand, thinking of selling on or directly to Amazon? Here’s some food for thought:

Should I sell my brand direct to Amazon?

No is the quick answer. You can often loose complete control over your brand. If Amazon buys your brand and they don’t sell it, they may slash prices (even at a loss) to sell it through. This can rapidly ‘mature’ your brand and extremely quickly, resulting in you needing to start brand building all over again.

Should I sell on Amazon under my actual brand name or a ‘ghost brand’ name?

Is selling direct to amazon a good idea?

This is a great question and one we get asked often. It really depends on your brand positioning. High end brands can use Amazon to gain access to their millions of active customers and it often drives traffic to their own brand website where they reap the rewards of greater margins then on Amazon. However, just as many high end brands do not want their products appearing on Amazon at all and this needs to be managed. Lower to mid end brands often sell on Amazon and usually under a ‘ghost brand’, so they don’t dilute their own brand’s identity, which they will have spent some considerable time and money building.

Mostly we’ve found, brands prefer not to be involved when it comes to their brands being sold on Amazon. This is a mistake, although you can’t leverage complete control in many cases (depending on how your distribution is set up), it is better to know what is happening with your branding than stick your head in the sand.

Need to talk to someone about Branding Strategy? Give us a call or drop us an email.