Stanley, B&D cement hold on top two spots - top hardware brands at discount stores; Black and Decker Corp - Top Brands, Part 1: Store Manager Survey

Discount Store News, Oct 1, 1990

Stanley, B&D Cement Hold on Top Two Spots

Thanks primarily to increased mentions among upscale discount store managers, Black & Decker squeezed ahead of Stanley by a narrow margin for honors as the No. 1 hardware brand in the 1990 DSN Top Brands Survey.

That reversed the results of the 1989 Top Brands survey, when managers by a tiny margin named Stanley more often than Black & Decker as a top brand.

For the past five surveys, Black & Decker and Stanley have owned the two top spots, with Black & Decker garnering the highest percentage of mentions by store managers as a top performing brand in three of the past five years. Stanley has taken Top brand honors in the hardware category the other two years.

The most dramatic results of the 1990 survey were the rise of Glidden in the standings and the decline of General Electric.

Glidden paint spurted to No. 3 on the Top 10 chart from ninth place, with twice as many upscale store managers citing it is as a top brand as conventional discount store managers did.

Glidden displaced GE, which slipped to a sixth place tie with Shop Vac just behind Skil and Dutch Boy, which tied for fourth place.

A comer is Dutch Boy, which is aggressively promoting itself as a discount industry brand. It ranked No. 5 on this year's Top 10 chart, whereas it failed to appear at all last year.

Lucite, a paint brand that PPG acquired in February 1990, fell out of fourth place to 10th among top performing brands in the hardware department. Lucite's overall share of top brand mentions, however, declined by only one percentage point, illustrating how closely the last eight of the Top 10 are bunched within a narrow percentage range. But its 2% share of all top brand mentions contrasts sharply with its 9% share in 1988.

On this year's survey, the top two garnered an even larger share of total mentions than they did in last year's poll of store managers.

Thus, with top brand popularity so widely fragmented beyond those two, it takes only a handful of store managers to change their minds about the performance of most hardware brands either to push them onto the Top 10 or yank them off. Expect, therefore, to see extreme volatility in the Top 10 ratings, except for the top two brands.

Other newcomers to the 1990 Top 10 chart are: Shop Vac; McCullough, chain saws; and Hirsh, closet organizers.

Royal, Rubbermaid, Bull Dog and Great Neck, which each got a point or two of the total top brand mentions last year, dropped off the chart in 1990.

Although Black & Decker edged out Stanley in the 1990 survey because of increased standing in the minds of upscale discount store managers, Black & Decker was just about equally popular with each type of manager.

Similarly, Stanley draws its strength almost equally from managers of both upscale and conventional discount stores.

For the top two brands, regional variation in the results are slight.

About three-quarters of North Central store managers named Black & Decker as a top brand, trailed closely by about seven out of 10 in the Northeast and South. In the West, the proportion fell to a bit less than six out of 10.

Stanley did better in the North Central region and the South, with about seven of 10 managers naming it as a top performing brand, with better than six of 10 managers in the Northeast and West considering it one of their best performers.

Regional variations are more pronounced for other top brands. Glidden, for example, drew its strength from the Northeast, the North Central region and the South.

Dutch Boy garnered most of its top brand mentions from the North Central region, with only tiny percentages from the other three regions.

GE showed strength in the South and North Central regions, but virtually none in the Northeast and West.

And, Shop Vac got most of its top brand mentions in the North Central region and the West, with none in the Northeast and just a tiny percentage in the South.

Standing of the top brands also varies by chain.

Almost nine of 10 Target managers named Black & Decker as a top performing brand, compared with eight of 10 K mart managers, a bit less than eight of 10 Wal-Mart managers and a little less than seven of 10 of Ames managers.

About eight of 10 managers at Wal-Mart, Target and K mart cited Stanley as one of their top performers, compared to less than seven of 10 Ames managers.

The percentage of K mart managers who cited Glidden as a top brand was three times as large as those at the other three chains.

Skil drew all of its top brand mentions from Target managers, while Dutch Boy received top performing mentions from K mart and Wal-Mart managers but none from Ames and Target managers.

The dominance of Black & Decker and Stanley is so entrenched that the third, fourth and fifth-place hardware labels at each chain barely garnered enough responses to report.

The situation is slightly different at K mart, where store managers mentioned Glidden (No. 4) and Shop Vac (No. 5) in sufficient quantity as to merit a mention.

The survey also found that store managers regard hardware as the third-ranking category in their store in terms of the influence they can exert over its product selection and display. Wal-Mart managers, along with managers of smaller chains, indicated that they can exert influence over their hardware departments. In that regard, hardware trails food, candy and snacks, and health and beauty aids, Nos. 1 and 2, respectively.