Store brands growing up.

Store brands are getting livelier, tastier, and much better looking. More shoppers in more demographics are accepting and buying them, more retailers are putting more resources into them, and more national brands and celebrities are partnering with them.

The Consumer Network has been looking at store brands through many windows in the last two months, and their momentum seems almost (but not quite) unstoppable. Big retailers are banking on them, and investing more in them. Jeff Noddle of Supervalu told shareholders at their May meeting that the company will "invest more effort in the merchandising and development of private label offerings," adding that they "see opportunities to target additional product categories with our own brands, particularly in the natural and organic area, where national brands don't have sufficient category power."

We would add that national brands' "category power" appears to be losing power faster than store brands are gaining it. In what we called a "Responsiveness Survey," we asked a cross section of our shopper panel how well 30 national brands and companies were responding to consumer needs on five measures:

* Product quality

* Product safety

* Packages and labels

* Environment

* Advertising communications

The survey was time consuming and required thinking. The response rate was even lower than we anticipated. The findings are no more reliable or projectable than the findings of two or three focus groups, and yet....

The responses we did get suggest that great American brands are very vulnerable. Only two of the brands we surveyed got consistently high marks on quality. Several major brands got high marks on quality from less than 50 percent of our respondents.

On the other hand, every major brand had some believers who gave it high marks on everything but environment. Most of our shoppers just didn't know how most of the brands and companies are responding to environmental concerns. Target was an exception; two thirds of the respondents who rated Target on anything gave it high marks for environment. In sharp contrast, only 15 percent of our respondents had any opinion on the eco-responsiveness of Wal-Mart, in spite of the company's industry leadership in eco-friendly store design and eco-packaging scorecards. Could shoppers' respect for Target's environmental awareness rest on their upscale image, their leadership in promoting smaller and more eco-friendly detergents, and their on-target brand symbol? Could Wal-Mart's industry initiatives with eco-friendly stores and a packaging scorecard for suppliers be first steps to challenging Target's greener image with consumers?

In summary, the response to our little survey helped us (and hopefully will help our readers) to understand the growing success of store brands, as more shoppers say "Why not?" or "Whatever."