Generic brands, strictly speaking, are those without a brand name. Sometimes, in their purest form, they are things like aspirin — no longer patent protected — and very cheap, if you go into the pharmacy/druggist and are sensible enough to ask for just aspirin and not Aspro. Aspro is exactly the same pharmaceutically, but at least 3 times more expensive, because it has built a brand image and trust through advertising, the former adding value and the latter having to be paid for. To maintain the added value and justify the price, they often include other (cheap) ingredients to which they attempt to attach justifying properties.
But the lines blur. Some products described as generic are in fact store brands (own label here across the Pond) which begin as cheap substitutes for branded goods (baked beans a good example) but which end up as brands in their own right due to the general commercial success of their supermarket owners. But this is a fairly modern phenomenon.
It wouldn’t make very good business sense for Otto Vinolia to go into the generic soap market for several reasons. The profit on generic soap is small, so the sales have to be large - that means you have to buy into large production facilities, a large sales force, advertise, and develop a strategy to keep the top end secret from the bottom.
It seems to have made more sense to build your business on a fairly cheap universal soap, advertise it everywhere, keep the name of your company out of the picture by inventing attractive brand names, like Sunlight, and then build the company by acquisition. Which is what Lever Bros. did. They are now Unilever, and not many of their millions of consumers can tell you which hundreds of brands they own. P & G did much the same. It prevents contamination of brands ranging across a spectrum of quality if nobody knows you make the top and bottom end products, but it does cost money to establish the brand names concerned. Worked for them, though - go to their website and see. Other companies, like Kellogs, prefer to promote the umbrella name — Kellogs, Heinz — and have subsidiary brand names descriptive of the variants of products.
For some inkling of how many soap brands there were in the early 20th Century, go to the following website, register (free) and put ‘soap’ into the search engine. Some wonderful adverts will come up, and there’s stuff on ships too.
http://www.maryevans.com/
I have also found an extremely odd website which sells ‘old’ brands of soap, including Vinolia, Lifebuoy and Sunlight over the Net. I can’t think who buys them, but there you go.
http://www.lifebuoy.co.uk/
Unless Levi can differentiate their differently-priced jeans, through adding value somehow on the high-price end of their range without letting the low-price diminish their reputation, they may be playing a dangerous game. Time will tell, though they are so iconic they may be able to get away with just about anything.