This week a mailer announcing Target’s newly redesigned private brand landed in our mailbox, complete with coupons for many of the products in the private label family. The new Up & Up brand, with its multicolored category system and bubbly upward-pointing arrows, is a departure from the Target bullseye logo. It also seems like a natural design evolution for a brand that often refers to a ’60s British-invasion pop sensibility — fun, friendly and colorful.

Target executives have indicated in interviews that the new brand identity is a reaction to the economy and consumers’ ever-increasing search for value — Target private label sales have increased 25% over the past five years and typically provide shoppers with about 30% in savings, according to an article in MarketingDaily — as well as a corporate-wide effort to differentiate the brand from Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart, meanwhile, is rolling out its own private label redesign for the Great Values brand, its top-selling line of private brand products. Andrea Thomas, the retailer’s senior vice president of private label brands, told a group last month that the massive private brand redesign, which included revamping packaging for thousands of products and adding new products to the line, would help the company increase efficiencies in its packaging and therefore pass on savings to consumers.

The new private label rollouts represent a dramatic shift in the “old way” of doing private brand, which in the past has been comprised of a few different approaches:

1. Create “generic” packaging (with little design thought put into it)
2. Create packaging that closely mimics the major consumer brand to which the private label product is an alternative
3. Create lots of subbrands that attempt to hide or downplay the fact that the product is private label

Safeway is still taking the third approach. As I cruised through the baby products aisle the other morning an adorable label on a box of diaper rash cream caught my eye — the “mom-to-mom” brand, with a cute, crafty-looking logo and pretty script type. Intrigued, I picked it up and flipped it over, only to learn that it was manufactured by Lucerne, a subbrand of Safeway. Check out Safeway’s Web site, and you’ll see that they still feature a number of subbrands, all with different visual identities and unique brand names.

So does the very public and sweeping rollout of Target’s and Wal-Mart’s new private labels represent the future? It seems that retailers are beginning to be less shy about touting their private labels, investing in branding to promote the products’ quality and value while enjoying the economies of scale of having a single approach to branding and packaging.

Public opinion about private brands has also shifted: a study in April showed that 4 of 5 consumers are “sold” on private brand quality, and that 80% of consumers have positive attitudes toward private brands. Especially in an economy where consumers are thinking twice before paying brand prices, major retailers seem to be seeing an opportunity to unapologetically parade their private brands.