The objective of this article is to determine whether national brand promotions and store brands attract the same value-conscious consumers, which would aggravate channel conflict between manufacturers and retailers. The authors identify psychographic and demographic traits that potentially drive usage of store brands and national brand promotions. They then develop a framework and structural equation model to study the association of these traits with store brand and national brand promotion usage. The authors find that though demographics do not influence these behaviors directly, they have significant associations with psychographic characteristics and therefore are useful for market targeting. Most important, usage of store brands and usage of promotions, particularly outof-store promotions, are associated with different psychographics. Store brand use correlates mainly with traits related to economic benefits and costs, whereas the use of out-of-store promotions is associated mainly with traits related to hedonic benefits and costs. These differences result in four well-defined and identifiable consumer segments: deal-focused consumers, store brand-focused consumers, deal and store brand users (use-all), and nonusers of both store brands and deals (use-none). Therefore, manufacturers and retailers have the opportunity to either avoid each other or compete head to head, depending on which segment they target.

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The authors propose that the revenue premium a brand generates compared with that of a private label product is a simple, objective, and managerially useful product-market measure of brand equity. The authors provide the conceptual basis for the measure, compute it for brands in several packaged goods categories, and test its validity. The empirical analysis shows that the measure is reliable and reflects real changes in brand health over time. It correlates well with other equity measures, and the measure's association with a brand's advertising and promotion activity, price sensitivity, and perceived category risk is consistent with theory.

Does private label use drive store loyalty? This question is important to retailers, as they decide how much to push private labels over national brands, and to national brand manufacturers, as they look for effective ways to both cooperate with and compete with retailers. Yet, empirical evidence of the association between private label use and store loyalty is both limited and mixed. In this study, we develop an econometric model of the relationship between a household's private label share and behavioral store loyalty. The model includes major drivers of these two behaviors and controls for simultaneity and non-linearity in the relationship between them. It is estimated using a unique dataset that combines complete purchase records of a panel of Dutch households with demographic and psychographic data. We estimate the model for two retail chains in the Netherlands-the leading service chain with a well-defined private label strategy and higher private label share and the leading value chain with lower private label share. We find that private label share significantly affects all three measures of behavioral loyalty in our study, share of wallet, share of items purchased, and share of shopping trips. And, behavioral loyalty also has a significant effect on private label share. For the service chain, we find that both effects are strongly non-monotonic in the form of an inverted U. For the value chain, the effects are positive and non-linear but do not exhibit non-monotonicity because private label share has not yet reached high enough levels. The managerial implications of this research are very important. Retailers can reap the benefits of a virtuous cyclegreater private label share increases share of wallet and greater share of wallet increases private label share. But, this virtuous cycle only operates to a point, as heavy private label buyers tend to be loyal to price savings and private labels in general, rather than to the private label of any particular chain.

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