Kirkland Signature does roughly $90 billion a year in sales.
That's larger than many of the companies whose products sit on the Costco shelves.
Most of the biggest consumer brands on earth spent decades building emotional attachment, household recognition, mascots, jingles, slogans, shelf dominance, broad reach advertising campaigns, and entire global marketing organizations. Then a warehouse retailer housed inside a concrete building that looks like a regional airport hangar came along selling coffin-sized jars of mayonnaise and started eating their lunch with a private label brand named after a Seattle exurb.
No mystique. No mythology. No purpose manifesto. No Cannes Lions case study narrated by a British man talking softly about human connection.
Just trust.
The brands didn't miss a trend. They didn't get outmaneuvered by a smarter competitor. They made decisions that felt completely rational inside the building while they were making them, and those decisions compounded into exactly the kind of strategic erosion that only becomes visible long after the people who caused it have moved on to different jobs.
Sometime around the middle of the last decade, the budget conversation inside most consumer goods marketing departments stopped being about what would build the brand and started being about what could be reported cleanly. Attribution models. Conversion dashboards. Precision tageting. Retail-linked spending with immediate, measurable returns. Trade promotion, which already consumed the largest portion of most CPG marketing budgets, kept growing while brand advertising kept shrinking.
A spreadsheet full of attributed conversions is a much easier meeting than a conversation about why you spent $40 million on broad reach media and can't show the CFO a direct line to revenue. The fact that precision targeting had been proven repeatedly to be anything not remotely precise didn't change the emotional calculus. The dashboard felt like evidence. Brand investment felt like faith. Inside a public company with quarterly earnings, faith tends to lose.
Several large advertisers eventually discovered their attribution systems were overstating impact badly enough that the math stopped making sense entirely. Some moved back toward marketing mix modeling, which at least attempts to measure total business effects rather than assigning credit to whichever ad sat closest to purchase. But by then the habit was set, the budgets were committed, and the organizational muscle for long-term brand building had largely atrophied.
All this time, the scientifically proven research was sitting right there, ignored.
Byron Sharp's work, which gets quoted in most marketing circles because it's simple and annoyingly difficult to argue with, says brands grow through mental availability and physical availability. Be easy to think of. Be easy to buy. The first part takes years.
Repetition. Distinctiveness. Memory. Familiarity. Advertising that actually leaves a mark instead of following somebody around the internet for three weeks after they already bought toothpaste.
Les Binet and Peter Field documented the same problem from the other direction, showing that long-term brand activity compounds differently than performance media. One builds slowly and stays; the other creates immediate movement that fades fast. The industry largely nodded at the research, decided they were smarter, and marched in the opposite direction.
The language inside companies changed before underperforming market share numbers did.
Conversations shifted to attribution, conversion, optimization, lower-funnel efficiency, precision targeting. Entire organizations became obsessed with proving immediate impact. The older discussions about fame, memory, distinctiveness, and long-term share growth started sounding irresponsible. Almost quaint.
Meanwhile, the reservoir was draining.
I remember conversations at Heinz around internal research showing younger consumers no longer viewing ketchup as a pantry must-have, tied in large part to the brand ceasing broad-reach advertising for nearly a decade. Brand managers and leadership reacted like the floor had collapsed beneath them. But brands don't stay culturally dominant through inertia. Somebody has to keep feeding the mind machine. Heinz stopped. Younger consumers simply never formed the association in the first place, and by the time anyone noticed, there was no quick fix available.
Then inflation hit, and consumers started doing the math at the shelf.
They accepted price increases for a while, because everybody understood costs were rising. Freight. Commodities. Packaging. Supply chain. Pick your catastrophe. Then people started trying the cheaper alternative. Some came back. Most didn’t, and the ones who switched and stayed were the ones who’d never had strong brand preference to begin with, which tells you everything about how much of that premium was borrowed rather than earned. Because once a customer realizes the less expensive version works fine, the original brand has to justify why it deserves the premium. That justification used to come from accumulated brand preference built over years of sustained marketing investment.
That's exactly where Kirkland was waiting.
Costco had spent thirty years doing the thing everyone else stopped doing, building trust in the institution and by extension the individual product. Members don't stand in the aisle debating olive oil provenance. They grab the Kirkland bottle because Costco has trained them, through years of consistent quality, to assume the product clears a certain bar. When consumers already believe the institution is acting in their interest, the private label product borrows credibility automatically.
It helps that in plenty of cases, the manufacturers understand exactly how uncomfortable this situation has become, because they're often manufacturing the damn private label products themselves. The Kirkland batteries have long been rumored to come from Duracell. The diapers from Kimberly-Clark. The coffee from Starbucks. The spirits from respected distilleries. Consumers figured this out years ago and started talking about it online like they'd uncovered a casino scam. Once that happened, the premium started looking very shaky.
The membership structure compounds everything. Costco charges an annual fee to enter the ecosystem, and the renewal rate sits above 90%. Members recruit other members. They post haul photos. They argue online about Kirkland products with the intensity usually reserved for sports teams and regional pizza disputes. That behavior has real commercial value, and it's nearly impossible to replicate once consumers stop feeling any emotional attachment to your brand in the first place.
At that point the national brand is negotiating from a position that many executives still don't want to look at directly.
Costco built trust over thirty years and collected the reward during the exact window when the brands sharing its shelves had quietly decided trust was too slow and too hard to measure. Costco kept building while CPG was scheduling meetings to discuss attribution methodology.