Monday, November 02, 2009

Smith & Jones : Tadka Marke

Brand : Smith & Jones
Company : Capital Foods

Brand Analysis Count : 425


When I recently saw the ad of Smith & Jones, I thought that a new foreign player has entered the Indian noodles market. Much to my amusement, Smith & Jones is an Indian brand and has been in the market for a while.

Smith & Jones is a brand from Capital Foods - which are famous for its Ching's secret range of Chinese food products especially instant noodles.Smith & Jones is popular in ready to eat, sauce and jelly etc.

Smith & Jones is making lot of noise in the media for its masala noodles. The brand is taking on the market leader Maggi Noodles head on .

Watch the TVC here : Smith & Jones

According to news reports , the brand is trying to redefine the Masala Variant in the noodles category. Masala is a highly popular variant in the noodles segment and has become a generic variant with the same kind of taste offered by different players in the category.

Smith & Jones wanted to differentiate by offering an innovative taste in this category . According to the reports, the brand is trying to woo customers by offering a " Tadka " taste to the masala.

Tadka is a popular garnish ( seasoning) made out of various spices which are added to the food to make it more tasty. Smith & Jones claims that its Tadka is made of 52 Indian spices. The brand is differentiating itself using the " Tadka " ingredient. The brand has the tagline " Tadka Marke".

I still wonder why Capital Foods chose to extend Smith & Jones to noodles segment when it already have Ching's Secret brand of instant noodles. Smith & Jones was having products in the Sauce, Ready to eat segment etc and Ching's Secret was a popular noodles brand. Rather than extending Smith & Jones, Capital Foods could have introduced the new flavor under Ching's. By having two brands in the same category, the company is going to lose both share and money. There is a chance of cannibalizing one brand over the other. And to fight a market leader like Maggi, one needs to be very focused both on brands and also resources.

Another aspect of the brand is its insensitivity towards the linguistic diversity across the vast Indian market. Although I know Hindi, I was totally clueless about what a Tadka is. I did not knew the meaning of it till I made a conscious search of the word. If the customer does not understand the meaning of Tadka, the entire brand promise will be lost. The brand will have tough time in communicating its core differentiation across non-Hindi speaking markets unless it takes pain to find apt word in all those languages.

The brand has initiated sampling across 3200 schools across India and is sponsoring lot of events and contact program with the consumers. The brand is also trying product placement in movies and sponsor programs in kid's channels ( Source).

It will be interesting to see whether Smith & Jones will be able to make a dent in Maggi's stronghold in the Rs 1100 crore noodles market. Differentiation based on flavor is not sustainable proposition. It will be easy for any marketer to launch such a variant. That was one of the reason why I doubted the effectiveness of Smith & Jones' foray into noodles .

Related Brand
Maggi
Top Ramen

6 comments:

  1. Anonymous4:11 PM

    Capital Foods has been deploying the classic flanking strategy. Ching's Instant Noodles are in chinese flavours of schezwan, manchurian and hot garlic and Smith and Jones are in massy Masala, Chicken and Curry flavours.
    Ching's is positioned as premium and tgted at youth, adventurous, bpo workers as well as those who r big fans of chinese food. It is not just question of flavour but Ching's also carries a 14yr heritage of chinese ingredients including sauces, hakka, soups.
    Smith and Jones is more positioned at school children, families and traditionally popular flavours like Masala, Chicken and Curry.
    I have seen the Smith and Jones tvc in malayalam, kannada and telugu besides hindi and they have used appropriate words like kar sar noodles etc in those languages. Tadka Marke is what they use in the hindi belt.
    There is ofcourse the rule of 3 in brands. This category has 1 dominant player maggi and u have top ramen in bits and parts(and constantly changing distribution and partners and utter confusion). There is clearly scope for 2 brands in consumer's mindspace. Capital Foods has to my mind very cleverly positioned both its brands. Consumer doesn't and needent know that they r from the same stable. If u look at the indonesian mkt for casestudy indomie has 14 instant noodle brands in 1 mkt.
    In terms of traction what i know is they have already displaced top ramen to emerge as 2nd and 3rd brand in northern states of punjab, ncr, rajasthan, gujarat. in modern trade again they are getting increasingly popular.

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  2. I guess that Chings is been positioned as a Chinese flavor rather than Indian and Capital Foods while launching the Tadka flavor wanted to position the product as a Indian Tadka flavored product, so it was smart enough not to launch it under Chings, but I guess more smarter would have been to launch a new brand for these noodles and do excessive promotion , obviously backed by a great product, so that atleast it would have made customers try the product ( and even shift) if the product is better than maggie.

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  3. Anonymous2:19 PM

    I think the Smith and Jones Masala Noodles are way better than maggi. i just love the tadka marke taste. also each strand stays unique unlike maggi which becomes pasty

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  4. Anonymous6:18 PM

    I agree with the above feedback on smith and jones masala noodles. they pwn all other instant noodles. i luv the print campaign 3 advt series they have been running. links below which i found on agencyfaqs.com

    http://www.afaqs.com/perl/advertising/creative_showcase/index.html?id=18387&media=Print

    http://www.afaqs.com/perl/advertising/creative_showcase/index.html?id=18522&media=Print

    http://www.afaqs.com/perl/advertising/creative_showcase/index.html?id=18684&media=Print

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  5. Anonymous5:37 AM

    is smith and jones curry noodles vegetarian?

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  6. Anonymous3:40 PM

    hi yes smith and jones curry noodles are vegeterian. best to do is chk for the green dot mark on any packaged product. if green that means pure veg

    ReplyDelete

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