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.