The Growth of Retail Power and the Brand-building Challenge

Producers, and producer brands, have dominated the consumer goods industry for most of this century. These brand producers are major national and multi-national corporations. Historically, they invested heavily in their brands, in R&D, new products, packaging, production technology, advertising, promotional support, consumer research. They alone understood their product categories and their consumers. They sent out their field salesforces to push their brands into thousands of small, independent mom-and-pop stores. The consumers demanded their product, or they would take their custom to another store. Small- scale retailers had almost no clout in the value chain.