Fizzy logic

BY IMPACT Staff

With clear focus on integrated marketing, Idi Srinivas Murthy, Director- Marketing (Flavors & Thums Up), Coca-Cola India & South West Asia Business Unit is looking at expanding the market for his brands.

How did your campaign ‘Limca Do Pal Taazgi- Har Ghante Touch Pad’ turn out for the brand?

Limca has been positioned on the platform of emotional rejuvenation. Our summer campaign featuring Adah Sharma was about ‘Do pal taazgi’ and the spirit of the campaign basically was about emotional freshness in the current draining and stressful time. In the second half of the year, we wanted to do an innovative campaign to engage young adults. It didn’t take a lot of research to tell us that mobile and Internet are a big part of their lives. It is a big part of teenagers’ lives as well, but their access is often restricted by affordability of hardware and so on. But for working young adults, the mobile and Internet are a huge part of their day-to-day passion and that is where we got this idea of offering them something on those lines.

Limca is positioned around rejuvenation and refreshment, and so is Sprite. What, according to you, is the core line of difference in the positioning of Limca and Sprite?

That’s true. The key line of difference I would say is that Sprite is positioned for urban teenagers while Limca is for urban adults. Sprite is a clear lemon flavour drink while Limca is cloudy. Both are positioned on refreshment in terms of their face appeal, but the key difference is probably the intrinsic promise. Eventually, all beverage brands in this category need to be thirst-quenching and refreshing at a basic level; that is one of the primary drivers of why you have a sparkling drink. Limca is more about water-like freshness while Sprite’s refreshment is what we call sudden refreshment. In our campaign this year, the experience we tried to depict from drinking Sprite is very sort of sudden and abrupt in nature which energises your body and mind and compels you to think fresh and different and come up with a uniquely Sprite way of handling a situation.

We’ve also been noticing a shift in taglines for Sprite ‘First drink, then think’, ‘Sprite - University of Freshology’ etc. What is the thought process behind these shifts?

We have to be a brand which has a perfect balance of consistency with unpredictability, because teenage audiences desire a lot of variety and they are exposed to a whole lot of new ideas every day. With every change, we’ve retained our core values. Our recent campaign is very confident and unpretentious. We try to give a new thought only in terms of the line, as to how Sprite should belong to teenagers’ lives, which is about thinking fresh. Teenagers are bogged down by so many constraints in their lives these days and the brand is trying to encourage them to think fresh out of their situation. In future, the brand core will not change because it has been very consistent. The line depends on how much you want to surprise the teen.

How are you using the digital medium to engage your audience?

On Sprite’s University of Freshology campaign in particular, we are quite happy with the way we’ve done on Twitter, Facebook and even through the mobile platform. For example, we’ve had a quick wit contest on Twitter where different people tweet about their take on the cricket matches going on and they score runs depending on the number of re-tweets they get. The person who scores a half century or century gets prizes. So the way we try to leverage digital is to be far more engaging, interactive and to let consumers speak. The idea for a brand on the digital platform is to be invitational. We have to create platforms which let people express their thoughts versus the brand giving a point of view. There is a big difference in approach in digital media versus traditional media like TV and Radio, and it has worked quite nicely for us.

Coca-Cola had earlier entered the powdered ready-to-drink market with the brand Sunfill, and it has now re-entered the segment with Fanta.

This is a unique launch. Honestly, our desire is not to play in the powdered or concentrate segment per se. There is a powder market right now and it has got a couple of players. Our objective with Fanta Fun Taste was really to give an offering which is more affordable for the wider segment of India. And in that sense, it doesn’t matter if they consume Fanta right now or any soft drink concentrate, but we want to give them a good quality beverage experience which is also affordable and which they can use it with a little more frequency than the normal soft drinks.

With regard to Thums Up, how are you looking at the competitive scenario? Are your own brands competing with one another?

Thums Up is No. 1 in the sparkling beverage category and the overall packaged beverage category. Therefore, we compete with ourselves to ensure that we are bettering our own performance YoY. In terms of category, we don’t feel the market has reached that stage where we need to combat other brands. To give you a statistic, if one person in the country has 100 litres of beverages in a year, just four per cent out of the total is sold in packaged form. In other markets, this number goes as high as 80-90 per cent. Even in markets similar to India, it is 50 per cent onwards. So, putting it differently, we see that the category of packaged beverages has a large head-room to grow and our job is really to make sure that we are giving all our brands and specifically Thums Up in multiple packs and prices to give consumers access wherever and whenever they want them. So ou objective is not really to battle a specific compete or but to grow the category.

Do you compartmentalise your strategy for rural and urban consumers?

Rural India today is actually accessing a lot of urban media. They are accessing brands from urban markets and there is a beginning of the lifestyle impact on them. So that is one fact we’ve got to keep in mind. Also, from what we’ve observed, rural consumers don’t want to be spoken to as if they are rural consumers. The rural consumer is aspiring for a certain life and in that sense, it is similar to an urban market. Obviously, we have to make additional media choices. For example, we invest in BTL to reach out to the rural market. In terms of distribution also, we are doing different things to make sure that we have affordable packs which can cater to rural markets and to ensure that our distribution structure is ready to reach these outlets.

What is your take on the overall advertising trend in India? What is your observation on the kind of communication that is going on?

We’ve moved from calling it ‘advertising’ to ‘different levels of consumer engagement’. For us, it is about an integrated marketing campaign which brings the brand very powerfully to life. We have to manage it at multiple levels. Level one is where you barely know that the brand exists. The next level is when you see an ad and you get an idea of the philosophy. But the bigger difference with core consumers is being made on the engagement levels. Today, the importance of this third level is high. The first level approach doesn’t work with third level consumers. They are far more intelligent in the sense that they have access to such a lot of media. They see global campaigns and therefore the value of the brand for them is in the way it engages with them and how it connects with them in that format.

What is your biggest challenge right now?

Our largest challenge remains two eternal India opportunities. One is the huge consumer diversity that we have to manage and ensure that the brand experience for both rural and urban teenagers is consistent. The other challenge is to accelerate convergence through packaged beverages and that means investing across the brand, different packs, price points, cooling equipments, different retail environment, etc. India is a big country, so that is the other big opportunity which we think is key for our business.

Feedback:dipali@exchange4media.com

Tags : CMO Interview