Store Brands Take Up More Room in the Medicine Cabinet

Private-label products are hitting their targets, so to speak. More than 40% of consumers regularly purchase store-brand products. Nearly one out of every five items sold in U.S. supermarkets, drug stores, and mass merchandisers today is a store brand, reports the Private Label Manufacturers Association (PLMA) in its new study. “Latest market statistics show that store-brand products, those items that retailers put their own name or their own brands on, now account for over $50 billion in annual sales,” the group reports. Ipsos-MORI, an international consumer polling organization, polled more than 1000 shoppers during the study.

About one-fifth of all consumers reported that they already frequently buy the private-label versions of health and beauty products, regardless of the type of stores in which they are sold, reports PLMA.

Affluent shoppers appear to be the most interested in store brands. PLMA found that consumers in the middle-income ($30,000–75,000) and higher-income (over $75,000) brackets are much more likely to buy a larger amount of private label in the coming year than those in the low-income (under $30,000) bracket. 

The findings are up from five years ago, when PLMA reported that 36% of shoppers called themselves frequent private-label product purchasers. The gains are even more apparent when 15-year-old data are taken into account—only 12% of consumers polled said they bought store brand products frequently, said Brian Sharoff, PLMA president.

Confidence in store brands has been building. Nearly seven of ten shoppers felt that the private-label products are as good as, if not better than, their national-brand counterparts. Five years ago, only about half felt this way.

Future projections for private labels look good. Almost two-thirds of respondents said they would buy more private label in the year ahead if store offered a greater variety of items, and six in ten said they would do so if their stores introduced new and innovative private-label products.

PLMA’s report on the study is “Star Power: The Growing Influence of Store Brands in the U.S.”