Building Powerful Private Label Brands in Creating Effective Communication Processes: Turkish Ironman as Case Study in Scope of Linear Communication Approach

Introduction

The field of marketing has been changing because of the differentiating market conditions. The changing expectations and attitudes of the consumers have been among the fundamental triggers of this change. The marketing approach evolving in parallel with the consumers’ demand came to the forefront with building more economic and beneficial product categories in the markets. Consumers’ changing shopping attitudes play an important role in the expansion of the market chains. The increasing demand in the market brought the branding beyond the product. Besides the tangible benefits associated with the product, brand value started to come to the fore with the intangible associations of product. In this transformation, developing communication technologies play important role. Especially, the development of digital communication instruments such as social media platforms and comment platforms providing detailed information about the products and the hard-sell opportunities improves the inclination towards thrift purchasing trend in not only the low-income socioeconomic segment but also the mid- and high-income groups. For instance; among these groups, the private label products gained increasing popularity in the last decade as a result of this tendency towards thrift purchasing motivation.

The private label products or brands can be defined as a group of labeled products that are manufactured by the large chain market groups (Beneke, 2010). These are the products that are manufactured by third parties but branded by popular chain market groups or distributors (Boon and Kurtz, 1995). This tendency was first seen in Europe, followed by the United States and Canada. Then, it rapidly spread to the other countries and regions around the world. These products have been produced in 1849 for the first time but the manufacturers have ceased the production because the penetration decreased in the first period (Herstein & Gamliel, 2004). Then, in the 1990s, the store brands reemerged and they became a type of fixture for discount stores in the last two decades (Abdullah et al., 2012).-

The first motivation of the idea underlying the production of private label brands is to reach low-income level consumers in order to enhance the market and category penetration and to create new marketing opportunities, which are considered as a beneficial method for raising the productivity of production resources. It was traditionally the product that promises the most advantageous price range to the target audiences. In the first phase of production (Hoch & Banerji, 1993), “the private label products were merchandised based on the price advantage”(p.57). The price advantage has increased the demand for these alternatives to the national or global brands. In the course of time, some of the retailers positioned the quality over the price; these brands still merchandise the price advantage to the market (Steiner, 2004). The first motivation of private label products was to meet the consumers’ functional expectations regarding the market categories. Over the following two decades, the private label shares reached an average of 14 percent in the market of the USA (Quelch & Hardling, 1996). Thus, it rapidly became very popular among the consumers around the world. According to the Turkish retail market report, the market share expansion of the small scale products was 30.3 percent in comparison to its development in markets with different sizes, and the private label brand chain is the leader, which is the most rapidly developed chain group among the private label brands (Nielsen, 2018). The private label brands are perceived as very synonymous with trusted and high-quality brands but having lower price alternatives (Walker, 2016). Considering this, the retail markets started merchandizing their own labels in order to increase the purchase intention among the consumers.