An in-depth analysis of the impact of retailing-mix levers on private label market share in the Fast Moving Consumer Goods sector in Italy is made. The direction and intensity of the impact of assortment, price and sales promotion is measured for different product categories. OLS and GMM regressions run on an IRI Group dataset indicate a strong positive effect of product range, which can be considered as a proxy of on-shelf brand visibility. Increasing private label assortment share thus appears to constitute the key supply-side factor in augmenting sales share on the Italian grocery retailing market.
Over the last two decades the development of private label products has been an important strategy for grocery retailers, who are investing financial resources and know-how in branding for many reasons. The first is that in a context of maturing demand, where there is increasing competitive pressure on prices, private brand guarantees significantly higher retail margins than manufacturer brands. Private label products allow retailers to make higher profits on service factors and increase investment capacity (Narasimhan and Wilcox, 1998 and Bontemps et al., 2008). A number of studies have shown that on markets showing falling profit levels, retailers with above average private label market share perform significantly better than their competitors (Ailawadi et al., 1995). The second reason is that the capacity to create, strengthen, sustain and defend their own brand is an indicator of marketing autonomy for retailers, and thus constitutes a proxy of their “power” in channel relationships with manufacturers. Private label, in fact, enriches this relationship with a new dimension; horizontal intra-brand competition for consumer preference. This is in addition to the traditional vertical competition on negotiation aspects (Verhoef et al., 2002 and Juhl et al., 2006). Managing their own label gives retailers greater direct control over the whole product value chain, reducing the risks of uncertainty in sales forecast for the products themselves and their relative costs (Putsis and Cotterill, 1999; Hansen et al., 2006). Retailers thus show a marked preference for integrated upstream channels compared to channels where control of production processes is in the hands of manufacturers. This is leading to higher commercial and financial barriers for manufacturer brands, especially followers and minors, to entering retailer assortment.
The third reason for investment in product branding by retailers is the opportunity to differentiate their range from horizontal competitors (Richardson et al., 1994, Scott-Morton and Zettelmeyer, 2004 and Liu and Wang, 2008). There are two complementary ways this happens. The first is offering a lower-priced alternative to leading manufacturer brands, with the aim of meeting consumer needs for low prices. This softens the competitive impact of more aggressive formats like discount stores. The second way is offering exclusive product/packaging variables to meet specific needs of a number of consumer targets. Original and firm-specific brand architecture makes ranges less directly comparable (Sayman and Raju, 2004, Esbjerg and Bech-Larsen, 2009 and Dawes and Nenycz-Thiel, 2013).
The fourth reason for private label product development is to gain consumer store loyalty. A number of empirical studies have shown the existence of a direct relationship between consumption penetration of private labels and share of consumer wallet (Steenkamp and Dekimpe, 1997, Corstjens and Lal, 2000 and Binninger, 2008). Gaining consumer loyalty depends on the ability of the retailer to build the brand in the same way as manufacturers do, creating a distinct brand image characterized by positive associations which are common to different product categories (Keller, 2003).
This has led retailers to invest significant resources in product branding policy, and the market share of private labels has seen steady substantial growth throughout Western countries. There is therefore a need for empirical studies to identify factors in the growth as well as its effects (Ailawadi and Keller, 2004).
The present work thus aims to make an empirical analysis of the impact of different retailing-mix levers on private label market share, with a focus on the Italian grocery retail market. Three main elements characterize this contribution compared to previous literature. First, it focuses on supply-side factors, rather than demand-side factors. Second, it explicitly takes into account a possible existence of a bi-directional relationship between private label share and relative price positioning. Finally, it is thought to be the first study examining this aspect of the grocery retail market in Italy, where the majority of retailers are still positioned at the initial stage of the retail branding life cycle.
The paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 reviews existing literature on the topic. Section 3 provides a short overview of the Italian Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) market. Section 4 describes the methodology and presents the empirical results. Finally Section 5 discusses managerial implications which can be drawn from these results and concludes.
