Previously, a grocery retailer without Heinz, Kellogg’s, etc, was not offering what customers wanted. Now the situation is not so clear cut. One key tactic brand manufacturers can employ is by supplying private label products to the retailers. This may sound like anathema to many brand manufacturers but this means they not only have an additional source of revenue from customer segments they might otherwise have found hard to target, but also they can keep product quality differences in place.

This last point is often overlooked. As soon as the customer believes the products are identical the brand premium disappears. An example would be Jacob's Cream Crackers which has allowed private label products to get too close. Innovation, of course, is key and the threat of product parity means brand owners must keep their core products ahead of the retailers as well as the competition. But as more and more retailers become the competition, by supplying them with the products that will compete with your brand you put yourself in a position of control.

So-called mundane necessities e.g. laundry detergent will hardly be given the same attention by a young man as the shirts the detergent will ultimately clean. The perception is likely to be that all detergents are more or less equal so buy something that looks reasonable but is cheap. Most shirts are also almost indistinguishable and yet what a difference that brand name makes.

All the factors outlined in the comments below suggest that this Golden Age is coming to an end. But that does not mean that brands will disappear, anymore than films disappeared off the face of the earth when Hollywood’s golden age came to an end.

What it does mean (if we ever learn anything from history) is that whilst there will always be a place for branded goods – since when were all things bought, all of the time, purely on price criteria? – brands will no longer be the dominanant driving factor behind business. And it also means that those brands that DO want to be dominant, need to get even more clever, creative and willing to invest.

Starbucks is probably considered as a private label. Is there any brand in the world that can compete?

The German market leader in laptops is Medion, a private label OEM that sells via Aldi and Tchibo. Brand-name competitors like IBM, Dell and Toshiba have outsourced production to other OEM's.

It’s an error because it suggests that there was a time when people were not driven by value. Nonsense of course. Try saying that to any European who lived through the 1950’s for example. It is, however, the sort of perspective that tends to pervade the gilded ivory tower of marketing: we too often forget about the real world out there.

Quality and Value have always been vital attributes for any product. The ‘no-name’ brands (which are often actually very well branded) arose as a powerful market force simply as a Newtonian reaction to the fact that name brands focused less on Value, because there is only so much information that a brand can meaningfully communicate nowadays.

Customers without doubt are getting sophisticated, and they choose a branded product or an expensive product because they find more value in it. It might or might not apply to say a purchase of Rolls Royce. The winning question is what do I get out of it?

This seems counter-intuitive, until you start thinking that much of the impetus behind the development of these brands has been in the printed media, penetration of which amongst is lower amongst lower income groups.

The question regarding the shelf life of a name brand barely escapes being the same side of the coin: A no-name commands 40% of a market, vestigial thinking says command 45%, invest in marketing, raise the price. Is this much different from what name brands do in the course of their life span? Except maybe in what they're willing to pay to us, the brand managers/creators.

(I’m also very far from sure that PL’s only satisfy the bottom needs on the pyramid. For instance, the ‘Esteem’ needs figure pretty highly up the Hierarchy, and as many have noted here, there is a certain esteem-based satisfaction for many PL buyers in having spotted a ‘sharp deal’).