With more and more stores selling similar products, consumers expect fulfillment through a unique shopping experience and a different product from each store. If a consumer wants to purchase any apparel product, he has lots of options to purchase it from stores like Westside, Brand Factory, Big Bazaar, Star India Bazaar, Reliance Mart, Lifestyle Stores, Reliance Trends, etc. When it comes to shopping apparel products, each of the above retailers has something unique to offer. To communicate the distinctiveness and speciality of their offering to the consumers, the stores have exclusive branding strategies, called private label, which recommend the store to consumers at the time of purchase.
In order to compete with national brands, retailers have developed their own private brands (Kumar et al., 2007). Private brands were introduced in order to provide value to customers and provide benefits to retailers with the additional tool of bargaining with national brand manufacturers. Private brands offer competitive advantage to the stores in terms of differentiation, supply chain management, cost management, and brand loyalty (Bruer et al., 2005). A few organized retailers have established the brand image of their retail establishment in such a way that the store is implied as a brand (Grewal et al., 2004; and Grewal and Levy, 2009). Retailers adopting this concept ensure that consumers view them as a brand house and not just a pickup point of different available brands. Retailers of most countries develop a positive brand image in terms of price that they offer, promotion they create and services they deliver, along with the brands they sell (Ailawadi and Keller, 2004). In an AC Nielsen consumer survey in 2005, 56% Indians agreed that private labels are a good option in comparison to national brands.
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