Shoppers want brands

Target is a major purveyor of private brands, and last year saw it launch Up & Up and even a line extension of it popular Archer Farms food brand. Despite the aggressive private brand push by Target as well as other leading national retailers, new research from Retailing Today indicates shoppers expectations are near an all-time high when it comes to branded products being part of a retailers’ product assortment.

Conducted annually for more than two decades, Retailing Today’s Top Brands report serves as a unique benchmark for the retail industry because it monitors consumers’ unaided expectations when it comes to brand names they look for at mass market retailers. The study asks consumers about their expectations across 17 categories, and this year consumers in 13 of the 17 measured categories indicating a stronger brand preference when compared with the prior year. In the other four categories where brand preference did not increase year-over-year, it either held steady or was down only slightly.

The study was conducted by Leo J. Shapiro & Associates, a leading market research firm based in Chicago. The firm conducted 1,028 telephone and online interviews during December 2009 to ensure a sample size representative of U.S. households. Those surveyed were asked whether they shopped in nationally known discount department stores, drug stores and superstores and then asked which categories they shopped in those stores. From there, respondents were asked if they were shopping for a product in a specific category which brand they would want to buy. This methodology has remained consistent since the survey began ensuring comparability of data from year to year and enabling RetailingToday.com to produce a brand preference ranking by category and a list of preferred brands by category.