Retailer own-brand products have been around for a long time. Their role was designed to offer shoppers an acceptable alternative to established brands at a better price. But that distinction is becoming rather outdated.
Premium ranges have become sophisticated propositions, including private label ranges that can look and behave much more like the global FMCG brands they sit alongside.
This raises the interesting question of where the future of private label is heading. As retailers are moving away from putting their name across portfolios of products and offering a wider variety, they need more efficient ways to know if their packaging design is effective.
Retailers have already bought into the idea of creating sub-brands where there is an obvious functional reason. In the UK, this is particularly evident with the growth of plant-based ranges such as Asda’s OMV! and Sainsbury's Plant Pioneers. Value ranges have also frequently been given identities of their own, including Tesco's Stockwell & Co. and Carrefour’s Simpl portfolio.
Retailers have built exclusive brands around cuisines, occasions, benefits, or product propositions, not just to segregate their categories but to create distinctive assets and meaning of their own. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean abandoning the parent retailer: the answer could range from prominent masterbranding through endorsed brands and subtle retailer signposting to completely standalone identities whose exclusivity to that retailer becomes evident over time.
And so that gives the role of packaging a significant creative opportunity within the retailer world, where portfolios are expansive and advertising budgets per SKU are far lower than for big FMCG brands, meaning packaging must take on a much larger share of the work. But retailers have something that FMCG companies can’t really replicate: control of the product, the packaging, the shelf and the route to purchase. And so the path to success won’t be won on just price – the opportunity is to build distinctive brands shoppers actively seek out.
We have used our AI-powered packaging intelligence platform, Pack.AI, to explore some hypotheses about what is making today’s strongest own-brand packs work – and what their performance might tell us about the future of retailer-owned brands.
When the Retailer disappears
Consider Favorina, Lidl’s own confectionery brand.
At first glance, it's impossible to link Favorina’s Christmas Chocolates back to Lidl. Favorina behaves visually much more like an independent confectionery brand. That matters because removing the retailer from the immediate brand story can give the product permission to create associations beyond those already attached to the parent retailer.
For a retailer historically associated with discount, that combination is particularly interesting. Favorina isn't asking Lidl's identity to communicate premium credentials… the packaging is creating those perceptions for itself. It points towards a bigger opportunity: instead of thinking exclusively in terms of own-label ranges, retailers can increasingly think of themselves as brand portfolio owners to help break beyond their traditional associations and unlock new segments and buying opportunities.
One advantage established FMCG brands have traditionally held over private label is their ability to stand out. Distinctive logos, colours and visual assets create shortcuts that mean brands like Coca-Cola and Cadbury are often the first products to be noticed when consumers are shopping a category.
Asda's OMV! plant range shows how a retailer-owned sub-brand can compete on those terms. On its Roasted Veg & Houmous Pizza, the Asda masterbrand is absent from the front of the pack. Instead, an oversized OMV! logo alongside its green palette and cut-out product imagery make the pack behave much more like a standalone FMCG brand than conventional supermarket own label.
Pack.AI’s predictive performance indicators suggest that it will generate extremely strong visibility at shelf, as well as being easily and quickly found by category shoppers. While it doesn’t perform especially strongly in communications measures, it does show the other side of the coin to Favorina in terms of enhanced visibility (82) helping win the first moments of the purchase decision - something the standard Asda brand identity would simply not provide. Again, for comparison, the average visibility score across all 200+ packs tested was 57.
Likewise, Asda’s Potato Pops show how private label can compete on more than price. The bright yellow pack, oversized Asda branding and playful product imagery create a distinctive identity that is hard to miss, reflected in a strong "Seen" score of 69, with Visibility on Shelf scoring 71. Its bold simplicity also helps shoppers navigate quickly, with Findability at Shelf in the 75th percentile showing how distinctive design can drive both standout and shoppability.
The bold design gives Potato Pops an identity that feels recognisable and ownable. And that identity can travel too: Potato Pops have recently generated buzz on TikTok, with fans helping to amplify the product organically - effectively doing some of the promotion for the brand. This is a strong example of how distinctive private label packaging can spark recognition and conversation beyond the store.
Conad, Italy’s largest grocery retailer, operates a sub-brand called Sapori & Dintorni, which has a notably different deep blue and beige visual identity from Conad’s familiar red and yellow - but what’s important to note is that the Conad endorsement remains clearly embedded next to the logo on pack.
As a distinctive sub-brand, Sapori & Dintorni is allowed to create associations that don't have to come directly from Conad itself. Its colours, typography, regional imagery and provenance cues can build a distinctive world around Italian food culture and tradition while also conveying a more premium feel than the retailer’s standard own-label range, but the Conad endorsement ensures that equity still has a visible route back to the retailer.
The result is a packaging look that feels more like an FMCG brand (and performs like one on shelf visibility with a score of 72) but with enough endorsement to ensure shoppers know who owns it and where they need to buy it from.
At Behaviorally, we believe packaging has four key jobs to do: be seen, be shoppable, be seductive and be selected. In other words, break through at shelf, make products easy to find, communicate compelling benefits and ultimately drive purchase.
Pack.AI, available through our myBehaviorally platform, enables retailers to rapidly screen packaging against these four objectives. It combines computer vision AI with our extensive packaging design database comprising tens of thousands of packs tested, and millions of behavioural data points collected to predict the impact of designs in an in-store context. Retailers could use the platform to understand whether a design will be effective before it reaches the shelf, in a way that's faster and more scalable when rolling it out across thousands of products in multiple categories.
Contact us today to learn more.