I have a cough and I go into the local CVS drug store to buy a cough syrup. I get to the relevant section of the store and I see on the shelf a well-known national brand of cough mixture, Robitussin CV. But I also see next to it a similar looking package for a cough mixture called Tussin CV costing several dollars less and marketed by the CVS drug store chain. I check the ingredients of both cough mixtures and I find that they are identical. Which cough syrup do I buy? As it happened on this occasion, I bought the CVS store-brand. On February 22, 2004, the New York Times reported that I am not alone in this behavior: increasingly consumers are being driven by the narrative that the store brand is the better buy.

Rob Walker's article in the New York Times was not about cough mixture but about dog food. But his point is general and even surprising. The power of the brand narrative has been so thoroughly examined in recent years that it is pretty much taken for granted: brands have meaning, brands inspire trust and (crucially) brands command a premium from consumers. Billions of dollars in advertising and marketing have chased this idea. 

How then to explain Ol' Roy? 

Ol' Roy Dog Food is a Wal-Mart store brand - a ''private label'' product -- what used to be called a ''generic.'' It's a dry dog food made especially for Wal-Mart, which is the only place you can buy it, and its attributes have been extolled in not a single TV commercial. Yet Ol' Roy is the top-selling dog food in the US by an annual margin of at least 20 percent, according to Wal-Mart. 

The story of Ol' Roy, then, is this: in the age of massive and complicated ''brand building'' efforts, a store brand without explicit advertising is thriving. Why? 

Ol' Roy is sold in a huge chain. But being sold ''only'' at Wal-Mart that has net sales of $245 billion a year is not exactly a drawback. 

And more importantly, store brands have gone from having a vaguely dodgy image -- what is in that can? -- to one of widespread acceptance. ACNielsen research shows that sales of private-label consumer packaged goods grew 38 percent between 1997 and 2002, compared with 19 percent growth in branded products. In other words, the nonbrands grew twice as fast. That's a threat to consumer-product companies, whose entire model is based on selling you a name you identify with and trust.

Why are consumers now willing to buy store brands? There are two big reasons. One is that retailers made their store-brand products seem like branded ones, with better packaging and better products inside. Peter Belinski, editor of a trade publication called simply Private Label, says that retailers now push their store-brand suppliers to match the ''organoleptic attributes'' (taste, touch, smell) of the leading brand in a given category. Even so, savings on marketing and R&D. mean the knockoffs cost 15 percent to 25 percent less to produce and can thus be priced lower than the name brands. 

It's also important to note that while Wal-Mart doesn't splurge on Super Bowl ads for Ol' Roy, it doesn't shun the underrated promotion tactic of piling up huge mountains of bright red Ol' Roy bags in stores. The simple positioning of products in stores is not as sexy a marketing subject as, say, a carefully orchestrated ''buzz'' campaign, but it is extremely important -- and obviously gives retailers' house brands an advantage. Placing Tussin on the shelf right next Robitussin draws my attention to it at the very moment of purchase. 

Over time, the tactic works. Wal-Mart says that its studies show that Ol' Roy now enjoys 65 percent ''unaided brand awareness,'' meaning that 65 percent of consumers asked to name brands of dog food will mention it with no prompting. 

What has happened, then, is that in the shadow of marketers' obsession with ''name'' products, private-label, supposedly no-name products have slowly gained both familiarity and acceptance. Tussin and Ol' Roy have succeeded not only by themselves becoming a brands but also because of the emerging master story:  a store brand may sometimes be the better buy. 

Read the New York Times

For more examples of Storytelling in The News, go to the Archive