National Brands: Use Effective Display Advertising To Compete With Private Label CPGs

Localization is one of the newest benefits offered by online display advertising.   Media planners can now divvy up geographical segments of the country as easily as they can produce demographics and sectors, and the effective display advertising campaigns built upon these plans can get as local as they need to be.

This is good news, especially for national consumer package goods (CPG) brands, who are faced with stiff competition from localized, differentiated private labels in supermarkets from Maine to Baja.  According to the February report "Recession, Recovery & Store Brands" from the Private Label Manufacturers Association (link swiped from the must-read Marketingforecast.com) the economy, while in a kind of recovery, still sports high unemployment, which is leading to a consumer pattern of staying with private label (aka "store brand") CPGs.  As consumers eat their lunch, the national brands are having their own lunch eaten:

Even as national brand CPG marketers plot to regain their lost market share with the introduction of new and improved products and ad campaigns,  consumers have their own plans.  And for many consumers, an improved economy will not necessarily lead to once again purchasing their favorite brands. Instead, many will continue to reach for private labels according to the recently released GfK Custom Research North America for the Private Label Manufacturers Association report.

The writing is on the wall for national brands.  They need to communicate benefit and engage consumers harder than ever to keep what was theirs.  As digital display advertising grows in targetability, reach and power, it provides brand marketers the tools they need to fight not a handful, but a hundred battles across the country for market share.  Effective display advertising campaigns for national brands should take place in local visual dialects, with localized media planning and creative.   Naturally,  a certain software platform for brand marketers is ideal for managing all of this efficiently...