Private Label Winning Battle of Brands†

Marketers Face Moment of Truth As Retailers' Lines Soar to Historic Sales High

Advertising Age, February 23, 2009 — BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) Package-goods brands face their greatest crisis and strongest threat from private label since at least the early 1990s. And that's the good news. The bad news is that this time could be a lot worse — more like the U.K. or Canada in the 1970s than the U.S. in the 1990s, according to some industry watchers. They predict a structural slowdown in consumer spending that could last four to 10 years, which, combined with increasingly marketing-savvy and aggressive retailers, could conspire to push private-label shares to a dizzying high — as much as six times the roughly one-point gain already seen since the recession began in December 2007.