The importance of brand names as indexes of product quality was a major theme in the battle in the marketplace between “private” brands and “national” brands, which took place in the 1930s and 1940s. Private brands were in-house brand names created by large-scale retailers, such as chain stores and mail order companies. Products labeled with private brands tended to be cheaper than national brand-name goods, and during the Depression years of the 1930s, they began to make inroads into retail markets. At the same time, the point of private brands, like national brands, was to reassure consumers that the goods they were attached to were in general reliable and of good quality. Although the retail companies that owned the private brands did not manufacture the goods they sold, the quality of the goods was supposed to be safeguarded by rigorous inspections performed before they were placed on the store floor. Faced with increasing competition from private brands, the national brands fought back, using the argument that their names were a surer guarantee of product quality. They even tried to persuade chain stores, many of which had their own private brands, of the unique value of national branded goods. At the 1931 annual conference of the Western Chain Grocers Association, H. H. Lestico, speaking on behalf of national brands, argued that chain stores should give up their private brands and instead stock nationally advertised goods. The argument he made was that the cost of advertising campaigns on a national scale ensured that the products being advertised would be uniform and of high quality. In Lestico’s words: “The national advertiser protects the millions invested in his label with rigid and scientific uniformity, which satisfies the exacting demands of your customers’ expectancy.”11 Because private brands, by contrast, did not engage in expensive national advertising campaigns, the suggestion was that they were less motivated to make good on their quality assurances.
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