The response to this year’s Vertex Awards was overwhelming with more than 250 entries from 21 countries and 55 retailers.
By Koen de Jong, Managing Partner, International Private Label Consult (IPLC)
By Vasco Brinca, senior Vice President, Emealae, DaymonWorldwide
Retailers around the globe today have more power in the value chain than ever before as many have become actual agents for change in the lives of their consumers. From a greater focus on health and wellness to introducing opportunities to access ethnic-inspired flavors and products, retailers often hold the key to a new world of better life experiences.
By / Perry Seelert
Does the Story of Who owns and Creates the Brand really matter?
There are two wildly popular television shows that are global, Shark Tank and Dragon’s Den, which are must-see viewing in our household. Both of them are cut out of the same cloth, setting up great confrontations between the entrepreneurs who pitch their product/company ideas and the “sharks” who evaluate them for equity stakes. I can’t get enough of it. One thing that sharks are always looking to tease out of the entrepreneurs is why they started the business, where did they see the consumer need, and did the company’s origin come from a place of true passion? They are interested in the heart and soul behind the idea just as much as the economics.
By / Richard Kohn
Winning in private label is driven by a few factors: Speed of response, flexibility, pricing and increasingly, based on my most recent experiences, solving simple problems for our clients.
Or perhaps they are just simple for us,because of our depth of knowledge and ability to perform.
Let me explain more. We know there are a number of operational models retailers use for private label. These range from extensive in house teams to totally outsourced supply. For those with less extensive a team, there’s a real opportunity (less so with bigger teams, but I believe it is still there). Middle management ranks in retailers having been culled in recent years. The result is a knowledge gap in those retailers that smart private labelers can exploit.
Managers working in major retailers today are very impressive characters. In most cases they have passed through the fast track management training courses as top performers. They are bright, intelligent and commercially very savvy. They also are responsible for multi million Euro/Dollar budgets. These are extremely busy people, used to success and used to wielding great power.
By Jean-Pierre Lacroix, President, Shikatani Lacroix
Retailers and marketers face a new set of opportunities thinly veiled as challenges. Looking at the glass half empty perspective – the challenges – today’s grocery shopper faces a complex (and confusing) retail environment with more than 60,000 supermarket products, and these numbers continue to grow along with the range of retail channels available. To amplify the issue, the number of weekly shopping trips in the U.S. dropped from a high of 2.2 in 2012 to 1.6 per week in 2014, and consumers are also more willing to accept living with less.