Storm the Norm

by Anisha Motwani

  But this leap was not into the unknown.

  Research had indicated that men do not really aspire to be fashion models or testosterone-charged supermen. Social trends had pointed out that the Indian male was evolving or, at the very least, aspiring to evolve. ‘The Complete Man’ was built on these insights and hence was real and credible and not a unidimensional figure that was the reigning standard. And, hence, the daring step ahead was taken and the insights were translated into advertising strategy. It was still the angry young man era. But the Raymond man was softer, and every communication created showed the changes happening around the alpha male. Within no time, the stand was vindicated. In the years to come, even the Bollywood hero moved away from being ‘angry’; and romance and family drama became success formulas for Hindi movies.

  Owning this persona helped Raymond to ‘own’ a multitude of real-life occasions and situations for its product range—from a job interview to a day at work, a reunion of friends and a wedding.

  Raymond’s advertising themes display a strong continuity, with each new theme representing another step forward. Raymond, in essence, has always been linked with the discerning male, who cares about looking good, and who sets his own personal standards of conduct. At the same time, over the years, there has been consistent effort to ensure that the brand stays contemporary and fresh in the minds of consumers.

  India has gone through many moods and, over the years, the brand has remained relevant by evolving with the consumer through its investment in consumer understanding, which leads the way for product development and consistent, yet fresh, marketing strategy, year after year.

  The core theme for the communication strategy continues to build on this concept. ‘The Complete Man’ wears his success with grace, but, above all, is someone who has found a holistic approach to life. Raymond’s advertising celebrates family values, relationships and cultural values. The Raymond man has time to spare for others—it comes naturally to him; he doesn’t have to ‘make time’ for his kids. The Raymond man is a warm, generous and compassionate being, who is greatly admired by peers and subordinates alike, and who cares for his family, friends, society and the environment.

  Complete in every sense

  Being complete is never linear, which means you have to continuously evolve along several fronts and it’s by doing just that that Raymond became India’s largest suiting brand. The company’s ‘complete’ approach to business—investment in product development, manufacturing technology, distribution and consumer understanding—will ensure that it continues to lead fashion for Indian men.

  In the nine decades of its existence, Raymond has tirelessly invested in the development of its products, manufacturing technology, distribution and workforce to remain at the top, not just in the market place, but in the Indian male’s mind, because very early on in its journey, the company realized that it had to mould the Indian male, rather than espouse his current state of mind.

  Raymond’s dream for the future is to become an international brand by establishing its presence in mega cities around the globe, while remaining firmly rooted in India. Raymond plans to continue building on its rich legacy, be bigger and stronger and the face of emerging India.

  LOOKING BACK: KEY PILLARS OF RAYMOND’S SUCCESS

  1.Premium at every price point: Indians are value conscious; to succeed brands must come across as premium on imagery and product, yet accessible in monetary terms.

  2.Constant Innovation: Use of progressive and cutting-edge manufacturing technology helps deliver innovative products that win in the marketplace.

  3.Evolve ahead of the times: Culture evolves, and brands must be at the forefront of this evolution through product design, utility and imagery, to remain relevant.

  4.Build Relationships: Indians bank on relationships, from how we buy to who we buy from. It’s also the assurance of the retailer that a consumer buys into, and brands must leverage the power of the retailer to the point it becomes a competitive tool.

  5.Extensive consumer understanding: The consumer remains the same, but what he wants changes, and brands that have stood the test of time ensure design, marketing and retail strategy flow from understanding the consumer.

  THE BRAVEHEART BRAND

  Saffola from Marico Industries Limited is the fascinating case of a brand that carved a niche for itself in a commodity market that was low on differentiation and branding. This meant standing up to strong and entrenched products like Postman and Dalda. Today, Saffola stands out as a brand that robustly accepted and dismissed challenges from local and global companies in its half-century-long journey.

  A pioneer’s vision: A brand not a commodity

  Marico has made a name for itself by developing several strong Indian brands and the man who has been the principal architect of most of these iconic brands is Harsh Mariwala.

  Harsh joined the family business in 1971, back when the company was called Bombay Oil Industries Ltd (BOIL). In 1983, BOIL formed three divisions: the consumer products division, the fatty acids and chemicals division and the spice extracts division. Harsh developed the consumer products business in BOIL and functioned as executive director from 1983 to 1990. In April 1990, BOIL was restructured and the consumer products division became a separate company that was named Marico Industries Limited (Marico).

  Harsh Mariwala took over as managing director (MD) of Marico in 1990 and, under his stewardship, Marico developed marketing skills and transformed itself from a family-owned business into a company that created high quality consumer brands like Parachute and Saffola. Now chairman of Marico Industries Limited, Harsh says: ‘With Saffola we were very clear from the beginning that we wanted to build a niche brand, offer a superior product to the consumer, charge a premium and not run after every single consumer available. We wanted everyone to recognize and remember us.’

  Investing in brand from very early days.

  And remember they did, because Saffola spoke a different language at a time when most edible oils were about food and taste. This new language spoke directly to the nation’s heart. Saffola urged the nation to move from traditional oils to a healthier oil as part of a new heart-healthy lifestyle.

  India was epitomized by a distinct lack of a culture of exercise and fitness, combined with a palate known for its fondness for rich, spicy and oily food. The average Indian was thus a ripe target for heart trouble. With a new media environment of heightened awareness of modern-day lifestyles leading to increased risk to the heart and the impact of edible oils on the same, the arrival of Saffola with its unique ingredients which differentiated it from others in the market was unanimously hailed.

  Saffola, however, was not just a timely coincidence. It was the brainchild of a keen sense of branding and differentiation: one of the sharpest brands in India showing decades-long consistency in its positioning of ‘heart health’. And above all else Saffola was the result of a genuine mission to bring a great product into consumers’ lives. Ever since, Saffola has worked diligently on the product side of the mix, offering new innovations and updating the oil on the lines of new scientific discoveries about heart health.

  Behind every successful brand is a high quality product

  According to Dr Lewis, former head of product development at Marico, ‘Traditionally in the commodity market, you couldn’t hide the truth of the product…There was no way to camouflage the colour or the texture. Consumers knew their oils well and would not accept a product that looked radically different from their existing choices.’

  Despite this, Saffola was the first to innovate by creating a blend of edible oils (rice bran and kardi) in a market where the traditional perception was that blends were adulterated or inferior. But when Saffola offered a blend, the same market opened up and accepted it without question. Much of this success had to do with the credibility of Saffola. But it was also about the performance of a high quality product in the kitchen.

  The fact that an oil company could create a blend that
was superior and could satisfy consumers is a testimony to the product development genius at work in Marico over the years. Even today Saffola is a pioneer in creating new blends and adding much-needed innovations like antioxidants to their oil. The consumer clearly recognizes Saffola as a brand that brings great benefits into their lives.

  Saugata Gupta, the MD and chief executive officer (CEO) of Marico smiles when he recounts that market conditions also played a not-so-small role in the innovations culture that Marico is now known for. ‘At Marico we learnt how to convert every adversity into an opportunity’, he says. ‘Interestingly enough, quite a few of the innovations on Saffola have happened as a result of scarcity of raw materials, or perhaps a challenge from new competition. We were always ready with a new answer or solution. We would refuse to be passive observers.’

  The turning point: Telling the tough truth

  To the outsider, a key memory of Saffola was the hard-hitting ambulance ad released by Saffola in the early 1990s. Living rooms resonated with the sharp warning sounds of the arrival of an ambulance to take away the husband suffering from what seemed to be a heart attack—the wife distraught, the husband helpless, the children lost. If you were a woman, a wife, a mother, watching this film amidst the sounds of an electrocardiogram monitor, this wasn’t just an advertisement but a mirror to the frightening reality of impending heart attacks. The message to the Indian woman was brutal but powerful—if you’re not using Saffola, you are actually inviting heart trouble.

  A Bold Strategy

  Saffola has always had a clear vision and strategy, choosing to offer a daring proposition with premium pricing.

  The Saffola Vision: Four Indians die every minute due to cardio-vascular disease. The brand’s mission is to reduce this statistic.

  Positioning: A premium heart-healthy edible oil in a category driven by taste and seed type.

  Target Group: Urban consumers who face the impending threat of a heart problem due to a busy and unhealthy lifestyle.

  And Saffola was not being unnecessarily alarmist. India is a nation where four people die every minute of a heart-related ailment. Saffola’s mission has always been clear—to keep this staggering number under check.

  This has meant that over the decades Saffola has never borrowed from the edible-oil category codes. In Saffola communication, there have never been women cooking wholesome food as sunlight speckles the kitchen; there have been no cherubic boys digging into fried samosas or doing cartwheels over just-cooked hot, fluffy, appetizing food items. The creative idea has always been to make the target audience face the hard truth.

  The brand’s greatest ally: An honest voice

  What Saffola doesn’t promise is a miracle cure or a quick fix. It is an honest, insightful, accurate and authentic brand that looks to change your perspective on heart health. Saffola does not encourage a lazy approach to exercise and diet, knowing well that using the right cooking oil is only a small but relevant part of a lifestyle change. Saffola has never been crafted like an oil by Marico, but as a heart-health solution.

  A large part of this honest voice is an ongoing engagement with consumers. Nothing motivates all the teams that work on the brand like meeting consumers and hearing their stories. Knowing that you are positively contributing to life enhancement when working on Saffola is great encouragement. Adding Saffola to her shopping cart is an act of quiet self-assurance for an Indian homemaker. ‘I know that if Saffola is here in my kitchen, my husband is here in my life,’ says a twinkly-eyed fifty-something lady from a Mumbai suburb. There are enough instances of households that find Saffola outside their budgets but believe that it is the oil for their hearts. So strong is the brand equity, so strong the belief that, given a chance, at any time there are fence-sitters who are ready to be part of the Saffola universe.

  So much so that back in the 1980s, rumours of shortage would spread panic among Saffola buyers, many of them queuing up in serpentine rows outside the Marico marketing office in Bandra Reclamation.

  Millennium move: The pioneer accepts a new challenge

  After a couple of decades of slow but steady growth, Saffola had, as planned, carved a niche for itself. But by the late 1990s Marico also recognized that there was larger potential for growth in the edible-oil category and potential for exploring other, newer categories. Accordingly, it drew up a strategic plan to develop the Saffola brand.

  Strategic shift: From fear to care

  The challenge for the marketing team was twofold: one, to move Saffola’s image from that of a therapeutic brand to a more holistic heart-health brand and, two, continue to bring Saffola out of the confines of the edible-oil category.

  Strategic Shift in Positioning

  Move from a curative to preventive heart-care brand

  This move impacted product packaging: Shift from old to new packaging.

  Communication: Shift in tone from ‘fear’ to ‘care’.

  Move from impending heart attack as a trigger of realization to daily signs of an ageing heart.

  Having been a pioneer in more ways than one, the challenge was wholeheartedly accepted by the company and, as time would tell, without ever compromising on its core values.

  Sameer Satpathy, executive vice president and business head (Marico India) explains that the lens through which Marico viewed Saffola did eventually change. ‘The ambulance film may have worked wonders in the short term, but in the long term we needed a warmer, friendlier image. The life-truth, but given out in a milder avatar.’

  Knowledge about Saffola’s powerful equity pushed Marico into working to change the association of the brand with ‘fear’ to ‘care’.

  Every element of the marketing mix was relooked at. The packaging of the oil underwent multiple innovations and improvements in form, function and aesthetics. Subtle and strong cues of care were designed into the packaging. Today, the yellow heart-shaped container is the most visible reminder of the care and heart-health association of the brand as it sits on the kitchen shelf. Saffola communication reflects the same journey.

  Was Kal Se the shot in the arm that Saffola needed? Could this be the new philosophy, a new way of looking at life—not with fear, but with joy and understanding? Kal Se (starting tomorrow) was a film about procrastination, about men who postpone exercise and diet efforts until tomorrow. The brand entered with a simple statement: ‘Dil ki hifazat zaroori hai aaj se’ (Your heart needs care starting today).

  What this film did was to create a new character—a loveable quirky man who would be seen across all Saffola films. This was the picture of the real Indian man—slightly overweight, who pays the gym fees but never sets foot in the gym and eats back all the calories he’s lost after a walk by gorging on jalebies and samosas. The weight he carries is a burden on his heart and reflects in his ability or inability to stride up a flight of stairs or chase down a thief. What this film (and the series that followed) brought to the brand was a refreshing charm that didn’t exist before.

  Huffing and puffing his way through a TV commercial, the Saffola man carried more than his weight; he carried a unique truth into Indian homes, a truth packaged in comic relief and not in fear. A subtle balance of anxiety and humour has ever since been key to the charm of Saffola’s creative work.

  Standing right behind her out-of-breath husband was the Saffola woman, no longer helpless, but now the alert, observant wife, ready to intervene, ready to take charge early. It’s fair to say that as a brand Saffola has never guaranteed heart health, but it does prod the ‘CEO housewife’ into taking action earlier, rather than later. The brand asks her to take a few steps and, in turn, promises to help bring changes and interventions in her husband’s life.

  An Iconic brand looking for better visibility

  In addition to having play only in the edible-oil category, Saffola was also held back by another unique reality. Edible oils are an invisible brand for the rest of the household. The homemaker engages with it, the others don’t—because we don’t eat oil, we ea
t food cooked in oil. As much as it made the transition from commodity to brand, Saffola soon undertook the transition from being invisible to being visible to the rest of the family members. This continues to be the key thrust in the marketing plan at Marico.

  As a result, the next decade saw product innovations and brave moves in the company to gain visibility.

  Stretching the portfolio: To shrink waistlines

  It was time now for Saffola to begin leveraging its massive equity and enter into newer categories. Research and studies pointed to the gigantic snacks market, a key culprit in mindless calorie consumption. Saffola Zest (baked snacks) was aimed at bringing a choice to discerning consumers who were aware of the need for a four o’clock snack without feeling guilty or needing to cook up a small meal for their children and families. ‘A great idea, but perhaps not executed to its best potential,’ says Satpathy. ‘But failures are a great learning in disguise. With Zest we focused too much on health and not enough on taste. That was a mistake we learnt from.’

  Saffola oats: Morning start for the heart

  Learning from the Zest experience, Saffola identified a super-grain that consumers were beginning to appreciate and adopt for its health benefits— oats. With fast-increasing awareness around gyms and fitness, consumers were open to new but safe food products that helped in controlling their body weight. But their poor taste on the plate did not make oats the snack of choice for households. Marico could count on its learnings to know that for the first time it would have to introduce the ‘taste’ factor to the Saffola portfolio. The time was right for Indian households to accept a breakfast intervention like oats, repackaged to suit the Indian palate.