Pricing store brands across categories and retailers

As sales of store brands increase, retailers are shifting their store branding strategies by raising store brand prices, extending their store brand assortments to high-risk categories, and marketing store brands in high retail image formats. The purpose of the research is to explore the effects of these changes on consumers’ judgments of store brands. The conceptual framework is derived from pricing, prospect, and information processing theories. It is tested in two experiments. The study finds that consumers’ use of price information varies by decision-making context. In particular, price-based effects for store brands are moderated by the contextual factors of category risk and retail image. © 2003, MCB UP Limite