Branding at retail - selling the name on the store.

Americans love to shop. We spend thousands of hours of our lives in stores - supermarkets, clothing and drugstores. We spend a significant chunk of our most cherished family holidays in department stores, discount stores and malls. But our love affair is waning.

We spend less time shopping

This shift, along with America's retail saturation, has had a disastrous effect on many major retail names. Since 1989, more than two dozen venerable national and regional retail chains, many with over a billion dollars in assets, have filed for bankruptcy.

However, it hasn't been a complete retail disaster - there have been plenty of winners during the same period. Some chains like Nordstrom's, Bloomingdale's and Macy's have been able to carve out a distinctive niche for themselves in this crowded marketplace. Some relatively new players - Henri Bendel and Gymboree, for example - have turned changing consumer attitudes into profitable market niches. Other older chains like Hudson's or Saks Fifth Avenue have been reinvigorated by fresh insight and new approaches to their existing customer base.

Invariably, the winners were able to see their chains as their customers see them, as retail brands, rather than as look-alike boxes. They recognize that people are loyal to brands, because brands add value to their purchase. Boxes are nothing more than places to find brands.

Marketers have long understood how consumers' brand loyalty is tied to their perception of brand value. The values of some of the nation's best known brands have been estimated in the billions of dollars - value that rarely appears on the company's balance sheet.

With so much at stake then, and so much to gain, why aren't more retailers doing a better job building retail brand perception among their customers? The most recent EquiTrend survey of brand equity had no retail chains among its top 85 brands and only three in its top 100 (The Home Depot, Wal-Mart and The Disney Store). Why aren't the hundreds of millions of dollars retailers spend annually in advertising, promotions, signage and events building stronger brand images for their chains?

Certainly one reason is that many retailers, particularly high volume/low margin retailers, spend too many of their precious marketing resources selling the brand names in their stores rather than selling the brand name on their stores. It's as if the brand names they carry are the only items of value available for purchase. At least that is the message they send prospective customers when they fail to market themselves as shopping destinations beyond the brands they carry.