In the coming years, we will see the rise of more interesting types of apparel, both in design and appeal. For instance, Fabindia sells a quasi-ready-to-wear dhoti. There is a ready market for ready-to-wear sarees. Similarly, there are opportunities to unearth regional wear and take them national.
What women wear is changing rapidly across urban and even rural India. The humble churidar is giving way to leggings and jeans. The leggings and jeggings – jeans-like leggings – are giving way to palazzo pants and so on.
The superhit movie Chennai Express created a national phenomenon around the humble ‘lungi’ with its mega-hit song, ‘Lungi Dance’. I am told that no wedding sangeet is complete without the bride party and bridegroom party doing the Lungi dance. I suppose there is an opportunity for a brand to launch ready-to-wear lungis, with a pre-stitched elastic top.
The humble lungi, which till a decade ago was the daily wear of peasants across India, may soon be on its way into tony clubs like the Delhi Gymkhana, as a lungi harem pant!
Bachche Toh Bachche, Baap Re Baap!
DADA WAS THE name of a Dutch company that imported vanaspati ghee into India in the 1930s, as a cheap substitute to desi ghee or clarified butter. Ghee was an expensive food item in India and vanaspati, a type of vegetable shortening, was made by hydrogenating vegetable oil which made it mimic desi ghee in its characteristics. Lever Brothers, now Hindustan Unilever, has always been astute in its marketing ways. They set up a company called Hindustan Vanaspati Manufacturing Corporation in 1931. They bought the right to make Dada in India and they modified the name by adding ‘L’ from Lever Brothers to it, and thus in 1937, was born ‘Dalda’.
Gerson da Cunha, the ad veteran who went on to become the CEO of Lintas – Levers International Advertising Services – which later became Lowe Lintas, recalls how Lever Brothers roped in Lintas to build the Dalda brand in the ’50s and ’60s. The brand had many battles to fight. First was the general perception that Dalda was an adulterated form of ghee, harmful for health. Second was the fear of the taste of food cooked in Dalda. Thirdly, there was the problem of non-availability of mass media. The company set up demonstration kitchens at grocery stores where consumers could see food being cooked with Dalda. Gerson recalls how Lintas was tasked to create print advertisements in over thirteen languages and each language version had to be created ground up, to reflect the cooking habits of that linguistic group. After many months of struggle it was Kersy Katrak who gave the breakthrough theme for Dalda – ‘Mothers who care use Dalda’. Coming to Dalda, it went on to win the hearts and stomachs of Indians, till government regulation choked the profits from the brand and generic competition took over the category of vanaspati. Hindustan Lever then tried to transfer the brand equity of Dalda by launching refined groundnut oil under the name Dalda – there was a rather cute ad for Dalda Refined Oil where the angry mother admonishes her huusband and son for eating samosas made for guests with the complaint ‘Bachhe toh bachhe, baap re baap’; the words continue to bring memories of delicious samosas – but HUL finally sold the brand to the American agri and food major, Bunge, in 2003 for reportedly ₹100 crores, says Business Standard, 5 March 20151.
In an article in the Financial Express, 9 June 2015, SL Rao, former Director-General NCAER, writes about the problems being faced by Maggi in mid-2015 and recounts that Dalda had many worse battles to face; Prakash Tandon, the first Indian Chairman of Hindustan Lever had mentioned to Dr Rao that Harijan, a paper founded by Mahatma Gandhi, had even written that you could go blind by eating food cooked with Dalda – based on a study done on mice2.
Cooking mediums or cooking oils are the second-most expensive food item in the family food budget – the most expensive being milk, more on that later. And marketers from the days of Dalda in the ’30s have been trying to change the cooking habits of Indians.
Saffola started the concept of healthy oil in 1960s and Sundrop joined the party in 1989. While Saffola was an expensive brand that used kardi oil and positioned the brand as the recommended choice for unhealthy heart patients, Sundrop which was launched as a refined sunflower oil brand was positioned as a ‘Healthy Oil for Healthy People’.
Right through the ’90s and 2000s, the battle was not so much between brands as between branded packaged oils and ‘loose’ oils. Given the price sensitivity of the Indian housewives, the branded players could not command a premium against the loose-oil sellers, to the extent that companies like ITC and HUL exited the cooking oil space. Marico’s Saffola stayed the course of a more serious ‘healthy’ oil and is probably the most profitable cooking oil brand in India in the 2010s. Till date the brand continues to be positioned as ‘Dil ka high science’ and their latest ad touts ‘Not just 1 but 8-way care’. Adani Wilmar is the largest seller of cooking oils now, with their brand Fortune. In order to appeal to the bottom and middle of the pyramid, Fortune has focused on the cheapest oil, rice bran, and has built a national presence.
As Indian taste buds and health awareness evolve, we will see the growth of other types of oils. For example, olive oil has seen acceptance in the metro cities and imports of olive oil has grown at a compounded rate of 60 per cent over the period 2010 to 2013, to 11,916 tons according to Economic Times, 23 June 20123.
Here is a question? Which refined oil contains the least amount of cholesterol? We posed this question to a group of opinion-leader women in a focus group discussion we conducted in 1999. There was serious argument about the benefits of kardi oil vs groundnut oil vs sunflower oil. We then explained that all refined oils have zero cholesterol. The ladies refused to believe us. I suspect with the overload of food information, consumers, even today, have vague notions of what is healthy and what is not. And there is a new report every day that disproves something we held as true yesterday. Ghee is bad for you, no it is good for you. Olive oil is good for you, no there are a few things bad about it as well. And so on. Thanks to urbanization and the spread of mass media, I suspect, over the coming decade, we will see cooking oil purchase to fully transition to branded packaged forms. The loose oil merchant of yore will soon disappear. As household food budgets increase, the penny pinching by housewives with respect to cooking oils will also go away.
The story about converting Indian consumers from a commodity mindset to brand mindset is an ongoing saga. Interestingly, retail surveys differentiate between general merchants and grocers as follows: grocers sell grain out of open gunny bags; general merchants don’t. The exception is organized retail players like Food Bazaar who too sell grains out of open bags. Moving from oil to grains.
It is late evening, the Tata Sierra mini truck screeches to a halt in front of what appears to be a beautiful farmhouse. The man storms inside, slamming the door shut and sits down at the dining table for his dinner. His wife, dressed in a golden yellow sari, is busy cooking in their open-plan kitchen. Their daughter is helping her mom. The man starts grumbling in Hindi that these Captain Cook atta company folks are making such heavy demands on us farmers. Selling wheat to that company is a herculean task. They want the grains to be of uniform size and shape. The grains should be so full of goodness that if you take the grains in your hand and shake it should sound perfect. So much trouble that it appears that they are not buying grain but gold. The smart wife responds, ‘If they don’t buy so carefully, how will the atta they make be great. And look at you, for the first time eating so many rotis!’ The husband is shocked, ‘Captain Cook! You too are using Captain Cook?’ The wife and the daughter giggle. The husband has the last word when he adds, ‘Give me one more roti!’
Captain Cook Atta, launched in the mid-’90s was the first attempt by a company to brand and advertise a food staple, atta or flour. The ad mentioned above, created by FCB Ulka and directed by Deven Khote, won hearts around India when it broke. But there were enough detractors as well. One ad critic wrote – How can they show a farmer’s wife using packaged flour? Which country were they thinking they were in?
FOOD STYLISTS: Food photography
cannot start without a food stylist. It is the stylist who works with the cameraman or Director of Photography to create the magic. Adding a little fig, a mint leaf or an olive, they create poetry with food.
The idea of using a farmer’s wife was intentional, since they would probably be the last to adopt a branded product. The critic was proven wrong, the brand was a success attracting competition from large corporates such as Unilever Annapurna and ITC Aashirvaad. And in the late ’90s, the brand was sold by the original promoter, Nitish Jain of DCW Home Products, to Best Foods of USA.
Packaged flour has seen good growth in the 2010s, and ITC with its backward-integrated process has been able to build Aashirvaad into a mega brand. Interestingly, branded packaged atta has found ready acceptance in South India where atta is not the staple form of consumption. The North Indian consumer who is quite an expert in selecting the right grain and getting it ground at the nearby chakki is yet to fully give up her old habits.
Indian food habits are among the most difficult to change and marketers have over the last fifty-plus years been trying to chip away food habits and attitudes that have been deeply ingrained in the Indian psyche for the last two millennia.
Amul with a total turnover in excess of ₹20,000 crores is indeed the biggest food brand in India. India was a milk deficit country in the sixties and the government used to import milk powder from the developed world. But today, India is self-sufficient in milk, made possible thanks to the cooperative movement pioneered by the Gujarat Co-Operative Milk Marketing Federation and its brand Amul. The father of the White Revolution, Dr Verghese Kurien arrived in Anand in Gujarat in 1949 as a government employee to manage a dairy, but ended up helping farmers repair their machinery to revolutionize the Indian dairy sector by scripting Operation Flood, a cooperative movement that turned India into one of world’s largest producers of milk. The brand Amul was an acronym for Amul Milk Union Ltd but it also stood for the word ‘amulya’ meaning rare in Sanskrit. Not only was the choice of the brand name Indian, but Dr Kurien empowered his advertising partners to create advertising that broke through the clutter. Sylster daCunha – and now his son Rahul daCunha – created the Amul girl dressed in a polka-dotted dress, and has continued to poke fun at the happenings in modern-day India. The agency FCB Ulka has worked with Amul to create the ‘Taste of India’ advertising campaigns as well as the ‘Doodh doodh’ milk campaign, all under the watchful eyes of Dr Kurien and now RS Sodhi.
Amul butter’s outdoor campaign is a unique advertising experiment in many ways. The agency scans the daily news, picks a hot topic, creates the ad and puts its up as an outdoor ad. In fact, Amul’s marketing team approves of the copy and design post facto. This was a tradition set up by Dr Kurien, who believed that ad agencies are but extended arms of the marketing company and should be fully empowered and trusted. It continues to be practiced till date. I don’t think there is any other brand anywhere in the world that has this level of trust with its marketing communication partners. From creating just one new creative every two weeks and putting it up across key cities, Rahul daCunha tells me that the first set of Amul hoarding designs were all rooted in the product promise of ‘Utterly butterly delicious’. It was during the horse racing season in the 1960s that Rahul’s father, Sylvester daCunha had a brainwave of making the Amul butter hoardings topical. The first one showed the cute Amul girl riding a horse with the caption ‘Thoroughbread’, and thus was born the topical Amul butter hoardings. Today Rahul is attempting to put up two or even three new creatives a week; these are amplified through newspaper releases, making this campaign seem one of the biggest campaigns in corporate India. His books on old Amul hoardings are veritable treasure troves of how the brand has reflected the changing dynamics of the Indian society, the happiness of a nation, its sorrow, its crimes, its misdemeanors, and of course its foibles, all done with tongue firmly in cheek4.
Thanks to the efforts of the cooperative movement, the price of milk did not shoot up. And thanks to smart marketing campaigns, Indians were encouraged to move from unbranded to branded packaged milk products. GCMMF managed to balance its role of helping milk farmers and the middle-class housewife, rather well, over the last four decades or more.
As a result of these efforts, milk consumption has moved up across the country and at the same time prices have not kept pace with inflation.
One well-documented fact is how Dr Kurien got his dairy technologists to try and make milk powder from buffalo milk, which global experts had said was not possible. Today a large portion of milk consumed by Indians, both powder and liquid is really derived from buffalo milk. A new report in Business Standard, 19 March 2015, said that Amul is now attempting to process camel milk; apparently camel milk is high in insulin content and hence is considered a healthy choice for diabetics5. Yet another report in NewAge, 18 March 2015 that quotes Agence France-Presse, said that a chewy cheese made by generations of yak breeders in Nepal has become an unexpected hit overseas, as a dog treat6. Known as churpi, the dried cheese made from churned yaks milk and cow’s milk has long been a popular snack in Nepal.
Just as we saw in the case of cooking oils, I am sure in the coming years we will see the milk market get segmented with various types of milk. Already in Mumbai, there are brands that are offering organically produced cow’s milk. Maybe they will offer camel and yak milk soon.
So have marketers managed to dramatically change the average Indian’s food habits?
SHOOTING ICE CREAM: How to shoot ice cream under powerful lights? Wouldn’t it all melt away? Not if it is really mashed potatoes masquerading as ice cream. And the cream on top may even be shaving foam. So don’t ever eat anything at a food photo or film shoot.
One of the most widely remembered ad that tried to change food habits was the National Egg Coordination Committee (NECC) campaign; Dr BV Rao founded Venkateshwara Hatcheries – now VH Group – in 1970 and went about revolutionizing the way eggs were produced. He was also a visionary who knew that food habits had to change to absorb the production of eggs. He roped in the ad agency Enterprise, founded by copywriter/ creative director Mohammed Khan, to develop an egg promotion campaign, to be released under the aegis of NECC. This film, set to a wonderful tune, made eating an egg a day – Roz khao ande – fun and fashionable. ‘Sunday ho ya Monday, roz khao ande’ (Sunday or Monday, have an egg everyday) went the hit anthem. Created by Enterprise and the strategic handiwork of Anand Halve, the egg campaign continues till date in a mutated form, but the ‘Roz khao ande’ remains7.
Consumer expert and social commentator, Santosh Desai has developed an interesting way of explaining the Indain food palate. He says that the thali is an interesting way to eat; the idea here is to eat the entire meal all at once; no waiting, no guessing about what lay ahead. Santosh observes that the thali is a wardrobe full of food; one gets to feast one’s eyes and tongue on all that one eats simultaneously. He has observed that in food marketing, the thali is the key to the narrative. It is easiest to change habits with respect to the margins of the thali; so branded pickles and papads are easier to sell than say branded chappatis and sabjis8.
Lijjat papad unlocked the ‘edge of the thali’ by going to mass media with its advertising during the Doordarshan days. Till date the funny hand puppet shouting ‘Lijjat papad’ is remembered by those of us who were brought up on Chitrahaar and Chayageet.
Market and consumer strategy expert, Rama Bijapurkar laments how no one has managed to offer the time-starved Indian upper middle-class housewife a ready-to-eat chapatti option9. Going by the ‘thali theory’, selling ready-to-heat-and-eat chapattis will be rather tough.
If we were to speak of one food item that is not strictly of Indian origin but can be found in every Indian home, we will have to speak of biscuits. Though biscuits came to India through the British and was popularized through the local bakeries, no other brand is synonymous to biscuits as Parle G. Parle Gluco was born in 1939, in the beginning of World War II. In fact, Parle was asked to
manufacture military-grade biscuits for British soldiers but it ensured that it could manufacture nutritious biscuits for the masses as well. Parle Gluco came under attack in the ’60s and ’70s from numerous clones as well as the mighty Britannia Glucose – originally Glaxo Biscuits. Britannia even used Gabbar Singh from Sholay to endorse it. In a bold move, the brand Parle Gluco rebranded itself as Parle G with an illustration of a little girl, done by Everest Advertising. The company pioneered small packs to woo consumers away from loose biscuits sold in jars. The company invested in advertising on television and played on the new brand name Parle G and the Hindi suffix ‘ji’ – the common way to address a person respectfuly. The earliest ad was probably the one featuring two kids playing with their grandfather singing, ‘Hum ko pata hai ji, Aap ko pata hai ji, Sab ko pata hai ji … Swad bhare, shakti bhare, barso se, Parle G’ (We know it, you know it, everyone knows it …Tasty, healthy Parle G). The advertisement not only established the new brand, but also made a strong social connect with the old and new generation enjoying a new brand of biscuits. Around the same time, Dabur Chyawanprash used a grandfather and a grandson playing badminton.
While biscuits went on to become a national favourite, breads continued to be niche product. Modern even used radio very effectively in the ’60s and ’70s with the ‘Mummy Mummy Modern Bread’ spot. Unfortunately, the government-owned company went into deep red and had to be sold to Hindustan Unilever. HUL on their part did try leverage the brand into biscuits and other products, but finally gave up.
Nawabs, Nudes, Noodles Page 9