McVities Digestive: Pot calling the kettle black.

 

If you go through any book on branding than one thing is prominently pointed out by every author. You cannot create a successful brand without differentiation i.e. your product needs to be perceived as different; if not better, from other products in that category.

McVitis Digestive biscuit did a great job in this regard, not only did they got Bipasha Basu for endorsement of their brand, they also came up with a winning strategy, where they tell that every other brand is using ‘maida’ (refined wheat flour) in their biscuits and you better switch to McVities Digestive as it is using whole wheat flour instead.

With increase in health consciousness in Indian middle class this certainly is a good strategy as we all know ‘maida’ is not good for digestion and eating biscuits with whole wheat fibers seems to be a good idea.

So, a known face to give credibility to the brand, and an excellent positioning strategy to place your product as a healthy alternative to other ‘maida’ filled biscuits. What else we need. Well we need honesty, while viewing the television advertisement we get the perception that biscuits of McVities doesn’t contain any ‘maida’ at all and are made of only whole wheat fibers, however out of curiosity when I checked the ingredients of the same, I found that this biscuit is using 43.3% wheat flour, 15.3% whole wheat flour and 2.5% wheat bran; now I seriously fail to understand the difference between wheat flour and whole wheat flour, unless ‘wheat flour’ signifies the same illusive ‘maida’, so while McVities is blaming others of using ‘maida’ in their products they are instead using “Wheat flour” which stands for what remains a secret.

I may be mistaken, so please you go ahead and watch this advertisement of McVities Digestive and then visit your nearest departmental store and check the ingredients of McVities products and decide for yourself, and if you can please call the company and ask for explanation, in the meantime I will log on to the website of ASCI (Advertising Standard Council of India) to lodge my complaint.

Chennai Express: Marketing Success

Let me start by asking you a question, what is similar between Bollywood movies and Indian one day cricket?

Of course there could be thousands of analogies that could be drawn here, but the answer I am looking at is that, there have been only 2 double centuries so far in both the places, and by 2 of the most loved people in both the fields (Sachin & Sehwag, and Aamir & SRK).   

Ok lets come to the point, why Chennai Express succeeded the way it did, well no body is fool to deny SRK’s ability to pull crowds inside theatres, neither the popularity of Rohit Shetty movies could be challenged, but it was more than art which was in play here.

It is widely known fact that now a day’s movie do their main business in the first 3 days, so to help themselves with the initial hype, and protect themselves with the effect of any negative reviews that may hamper the business of the movie in coming days, the movie producers came out with 3500 prints, this is a record for the higest number prints for any hindi movie, more prints meant more screens and more houseful boards.

But that was not the only strategy, the name of the movie played the primary role in attracting the audience from south India, additionally a large chunk of dialogues in the movie were in Tamil, making it an additional attraction for the Tamil speaking audience, don’t forget that Tamil Nadu as a state is star crazy and regional movie do business in volumes that can give a run for the money to hindi biggies; but the icing on the cake was definitely the ‘lungi dance’ song in honor of Rajnikant. There is  a large fan base of Rajnikant who are ready to wait for even a week outside the ticket window to get the first day first show ticket for his movies, and definitely this song would have made crowds pour into theatres, it must be noted that Chennai Express has done more business in this territory (Tamil Nadu - Keral) than any other hindi movie till date, so it should not surprise you if in near future you find names of other cities in movie titles with song dedications to local super heroes.

Just for fun let assume there is a Hollywood movie, starring Tom Cruis and Angelina Joile, with 15% dialogues in hindi and a item number by Tom Cruise praising none other than Mr Amitabh Bachchan, wouldn’t non-english speaking audience will be intrigued, well at least I would.

New Fanta Ad: Battle of the Oranges

 

First of all a disclaimer, I have never been an admirer of 'Fanta' Advertisements, its main competitor 'Mirinda' are even worse in this department. Sometimes it feels like there is a competition going on between these two, however not to capture more market share, but to look ridiculous. On the name of 'Pagalpanti bhi jaroori hai' the production team of 'Mirinda' conveniently distances itself from any decent thought they might have for making a sensible commercial and 'Fanta' on the other hand has been relying on animation based advertising where every character likes making high jumps for no apparent reason. Maybe the target group for both the companies is kids because only they can get amused by these concepts.

There is apparently no problem with targeting the children but maybe they need to revisit their positioning strategy. Rather than children, maybe students and young executives will be a better target group due to their spending potential and because they are more likely to make a purchase decision than children where parents are more likely to decide which beverage their children should drink. Not to forget that in many cases parents will restrict their children from taking an aerated drink.

However the latest commercial of 'Fanta' is a better attempt in a lot of respects. First of all the animated characters in this commercial are not jumping, so it is a big relief, secondly it plays with the mentality of the viewer, how? Well in the commercial 4 children are sitting around a dinner table, filling up their glasses with 'Fanta', however by the time the Fanta bottle reaches the last kid, the bottle has become empty, now I expected the other kids to contribute some portion of their drink with the last kid, (that's how an Indian thinks), but to my surprise we see mommy dearest arriving out of kitchen coming to the rescue of the kid with a fully filled up bottle of 'Fanta'.

So that how, on a subconscious level the advertiser tells you consume more rather than share what you already have, rather than going for more customers the strategy is to increase per capita consumption, not bad, but what the advertisers may be missing is the fact that Indian's as a lot love to share even with strangers (Please travel in trains for more clarification) and here we are taking of family and friends and secondly you will hardly find two bottles of the same cold drink in an Indian middle class refrigerator. So Best of Luck.