Brand Strategy in the Food Market: A Conceptual Analysis

Abstract: Food market is a sector where strong competition exists and companies must try to evidence themselves from the wide offer consumers have available. Brands are an important strategic asset to help them acquire competitive advantage in the long term as they enhance the products with the power of brand equity which, in simple terms helps to explain how it’s possible to obtain different results from a branded product than from an unbranded one. Retail brands are a derivation of a brand and embody the personality of the retailer being about 30% cheaper than brands. Interestingly is to observe that in the past retail brands were seen as a low quality offer but nowadays they actually compete against national brands. In order to fight retail brands, national brands may adopt one of the four strategies: a do nothing strategy or do a price adjustment, a quality adjustment or a portfolio adjustment. The strategy of doing nothing may harm brands forever as a misinterpreted evaluation of the power of the national brand could actually conduct it to a niche were few consumers would actually be interested in buying. The three remaining strategies, namely price adjustment, quality adjustment and portfolio adjustment will constitute the basis of this work. The aim of this work is to conceptually analyze how these strategies work and what would be the most appropriate choice for companies in order to actually win the battle against retail brands. This work enlightens the power of a brand, the present scenario and provides agenda for future work.