Eveready : Give Me Red

Brand : Eveready
Company: Eveready Industries Ltd
Agency: Rediffusion
Brand Count : 99

Eveready is a market leader in the 1500 crore drycell market in India. At present this brand holds around 47 % market share. Nippo follows with a market share of 28%. Eveready was one of the first brands in this segment. A flagship brand of BM Khaitan group, this brand is bracing for a marketing war against its competitors.The brand has a history dated as way back as 1934.

The brand is carefully nurtured by the company. Lots of money is being spent on brand building in a seemingly low involvement product category.

During the early ninties the brand created ripples in the market by its " Give me Red" campaign. The campaign changed the way batteries are perceived and the campaign was a hit among the target audience. The ad highlighted the color "Red" and for the next 16 years " red" was the central point in the brand campaign. The Give me Red campaign gave an instant recognition for the brand among the TG which was young 15-25. The rationale was the popularity of walkmans and portable music players which created a new market for batteries.

Buoyed by the success of the campaign and wanting to create more punch to the brand, Eveready roped in Amitabh Bachchan to endorse the brand. It was a costly affair and from then on the " Give Me Red" campaign got diluted. BigB and the campaign did not gel together. While the campaign was aimed at younger crowd, B was a misfit. Again should you need a celebrity to endorse a battery is another question altogether.( company says that Big B campaign raised the market share from 41% to 47% since 2003).

Now another campaign was kicked off by Eveready changing the positioning of the brand. While " Give me red" positioned the brand as an energetic and sturdy brand, the new campaign aims to look at more features rather than image. The new positioning strategy is to highlight the EMD( Electromagnesium) factor which will make the battery last more and give a good 15% more performance than its competitors.

The current campaign is full of hyperbole with Amitabh again as a shopkeeper. The ad seems like a parody of the successful Cadbury's " Pappu Pass Ho gaya" campaign (which had some novelty around it). The Eveready campaign yet again failed to utilize the charisma of Amitabh. The product may sell more because of the features not the campaign.

The company also changed its base line to " Kutch to hai Extra" from the highly successful " give me red". The only reason can be that the company officials and ad agency is bored by the baseline not because the customer has rejected the baseline. "Kutch to hai Extra " is actually diluting the intended positioning on the features. The new baseline have striking resemblance with Maggi Ketchup's baseline " Its different" where there is no difference as such. Kutch to hai extra loses significance because the ad is a hyperbole with no tangible benefits shown. So there is a risk that customer will not believe that there is some thing extra in Eveready.

All said and done, Eveready is having a major say in the market with its established brand and virtually no serious competition. But with the disruptive innovations like iPod and Mp3 players that do not need conventional batteries, Eveready should be alert to the changing market dynamics and a possibility of disruption. Already signs are their in the form of Mobile phones used as a walkman where the battery used is not the conventional one.

For now its " Give Me Red"