L’eggs made the assumption that no viable competitors would enter the market. If competition did appear in one or more of the rollout markets planned for L’eggs, the company had some flexibility to change the sequence of the rollout markets. This and other alternatives were to be considered only after careful evaluation of the competitive effort to assess its real potential impact on L’eggs.
In the test markets, L’eggs remained the only heavily advertised brand of hosiery with broad distribution in the food and drug outlets. The competition that did appear was in isolated markets only and generally was restricted to price cutting. In one market, one brand did a significant amount of newspaper advertising offering a twenty-five-cent coupon. In another market, a competitive brand slightly increased its television and newspaper advertising after L’eggs entered the market. None of this had any significant impact on the L’eggs brand during the test market period.