Celebrating Success: Yulia Dzenkovska

Congratulations to Yulia for the acceptance of the co-authored paper “Discount Venture Brands: Self-congruity and Perceived Value-for-Money?” in the Journal of Business Research.

The market share of private-label brands has been growing steadily throughout the past years. In UK, both grocery stores and other retailers are using private-label brands to offer brand-exclusive products that differentiate the company’s offering from those of the competitors. Tesco has been at the forefront of introducing a new type of private-label brands: discount venture brands. These brands, such as Molly’s, are priced at the value level and are exclusive to the retailer. However, unlike traditional private-label brands, discount venture brands do not display retailer branding at all. While some experts claim that discount venture brands offer growth opportunities for the retailers, there have also been a lot of scepticism about the potential of those brands. As Tesco is switching from their traditional Tesco Value products to discount venture brands, the marketing managers of the company need to know whether the new type of branding is providing more value to both the customers and the company.

This research is the first academic inquiry into the ability of discount venture brands to increase the perceived value of the brand image of both the products and the retailer in question. It does so by looking at the brand value through the lenses of self-congruity. The findings suggest that for price-sensitive customers, self-congruity is higher for conventional budget brands than discount venture brands, and thus the perception of value of conventional brands is higher that that of new discount venture brands.