Done well, store brands leverage their guaranteed distribution to produce healthy margins, reinforce and enhance the retail brand, and create a competitive advantage over competing retailers. Done less-than-well, store brand initiatives can fail to recoup the development and marketing investment, confuse the customer, and sub-optimize the merchandising mix.

The challenge for retailers competing with packaged good manufacturers is the lack of deep category user insights that inform and guide the judgment of marketers. This is particularly painful when the traditional iterative innovation process relies so heavily on informed judgment.

This is where Affinnova helps level the playing field for retailers. Our IDDEA technology enables marketers to explore a robust space of product or brand alternatives, and then vets the entire space with customers to identify the concepts with the greatest market potential.

IDDEA II includes a measurement stage that will evaluate the top concepts against current store brand and national brand benchmark concepts. This gives clarity on whether the category is right for a store brand launch and if so, which of the top concepts is most competitive, and how best to package and promote the products for success on the retail shelf.