I bet you could get a rather extravagent tool belt that would provide as much coverage

I'm confused. I'm positive I've been seeing Relic brand in J.C. Penney for years before Kohl's was even around.

I've never gone into Kohl's even though there's one close by. Their ads, those color inserts that fall out of the newspaper, say "we're crappier than Mervyn's" to me.

But I'm no fashionista, I shop at Penney's.

The best example of private label branding is Trader Joes. Their stratigies and products were often discussed in meetings with brand managers when I was the marketing manager for a major food service distributor. Food retailers and distributors were some of the first to offer "exclusive" brands. Trader Joes has taken that to a whole new level in that arena.

MOST other retailers now have their own "private lable" products that many people don't even realize they aren't buying a national brand when purchasing. Macy's hip clothing line, INC is their own brand, but most people don't even realize that when purchasing and expect the quality to be as high as the other manufacturer brands in the department next door.

It's a fascinating area of marketing and one that is changing quickly. Over 5 years, my job became more and more about marketing our own exclusive brands while still walking a fine line with major manufacturers (who cut us the sweetest deals and brough in the majority of my marketing income).

I don't know about other industries but in mine we called it white labelling. We built a product, sold it to a bunch of small banks who each sold it as their own product but we provided all the back-end.

Hmm, interesting. I suppose Kohl's just jumped on the fast-track in that direction. I guess what made it seem to stick out more than others to me is the ratio of private brand to national brand at Kohl's. It's almost nothing but, with national brands getting a rack or two at most in most departments (Dockers and Levis being the exception in the Men's department). The private brands dominate Kohl's real estate and catalog space.

I suppose I need to extend my praise beyond Kohl's. Really, the initial thing we were impressed by was less the overall marketing strategy than the one detail of the naming. It's got to be hard to come up with brand names that fit so neatly into the American psyche without sounding like a cheap knock-off brand.

Most brands fit so seamlessly into the psyche that most people don't even know that it is an exclusive brand.

Yes, I often expect the cars they sell at Costco to have the Kirkland name on them somewhere... :D

Cars are another great example of branding stratigies. Same car with slight modifications appeal to different segments of the market.

Note: it's not "store brand" or "generic," it's an "exclusive brand."

Yes, you MUST use the proper nomenclature. They trained my well at my company (as I responsible for training 200+ sales people).

Can I tell you again how much I love pet sitting?