Secret Temptations : Sorry Boys

Brand : Secret Temptations
Company : McNroe Chemicals
( Marketed by Future Brands)

Agency : Euro Rscg


Brand Analysis Count : 379

After spreading a fire of controversy with the brand Wild Stone, McNroe Chemicals is back with another deodorant brand named " Secret Temptations". The new brand of deo which is targeting the girls is already making noise in the visual media.

Secret Temptations is marketed by Future Brands which is the brand- consultancy division of the Future Group. By associating with India's largest retail company, the brand has already have ensured presence across India. With the backing of this large retail giant, the only thing that Secret Temptations have to concentrate is to build the brand.

According to Exchange4Media website, Secret Temptations is a popular brand in Eastern India. It was in 2009 that the brand have made a national launch.

The launch of a deo targeting the female segment makes sense because there is a potential for a deo brand in this segment. Rexona ,Cuticura, Fa and Spinz are the major players in this category.And none of these players are aggressive in the market interms of brand building and promotions. Rexona is banking on its past glory and other players are silent in the market.

The market is flood with imported brands and I feel that the threat of Indian brands are from these imports rather than the domestic competition.

Secret Temptations is targeting the teens and youngsters. Although the name Secret Temptations can give the brand a sexy connotation, the company has deliberately decided to go decent about this brand compared to the controversies created by WildStone brand.

The launch campaign of Secret Temptations is a good one ,clearly communicating the brand's promise.

Watch the campaign here : Secret Temptations

The idea of guys being " floored" by the fragrance and the girl playing hide & seek gives the brand a sense of 'cool'. The fact that the girl choose not to reveal the identity to the "impressed" guy also makes a point- which will be liked by the target audience. At last there is an ad which breaks the usual pattern .

The brand also has a cool tagline " Sorry Boys" which is inline with the positioning of the brand . While most of the female personal grooming brands are centred around the concept of " impressing guys" theme, it is refreshing to see a brand towing a different path - girls playing " hard to get" .

It will be interesting to see how the market leader Rexona will react to the competition. HUL has been showing some of the foreign ads for Rexona currently rather than developing India-centric campaigns.The leader is complacent and it gives an opportunity for a challenger brand like Secret Temptations to make a place of itself in the Indian market.

According to reports, Secret Temptation is not going to be a pure deo brand but a personal grooming brand for girls.

Related Brand

Wild Stone

Brand Update ; Scooty

Scooty is a brand which has more brand updates than any other brands analyzed in this blog. The simple reason is that this brand never fails to innovate.
Peter Drucker wisely said that there are only two critical tasks for an organization - Marketing and Innovation.
TVS Scooty is a brand that virtually practices this dictum.

This January ,Scooty launched another variant Scooty Streak in the Indian market. The new variant is a more stylish and trendy scooter targeting the new generation girls. The brand website boasts about a new and trendy look for this variant.
But I did not visibly see any big difference between Scooty Pep+ and the new variant.The specs and style looks almost the same.

More than the looks, the new variant is an opportunity created by the brand to build itself. And Scooty has done it with style. For this variant, it has roped in the tennis diva Sania Mirza as the brand ambassador.

The choice of Sania is also wise because she is a respected aspirational figure for today's young gals. She has the looks and the attitude that the new gen gals like.


The new variant is being positioned as Tough and Trendy scooter for the newgen girls. The scooter now has LED tail-lamps , easy to use centre stand, external fuel fill etc.
Now TVS Scooty have four variants in the Indian market
Scooty Pep+
Scooty Teenz
Scooty Teenz electric
Scooty Streak.

The natural question is whether these variants will cannibalize each other and create a confusion in the market.
Although Scooty Pep+ and Streak only have a difference in price of Rs 3000, the brand is trying to offer a complete range of scooters for the consumer through these variants.

Another factor that I like about Scooty is its focus on using internet as a medium for giving brand information. Each variant of Scooty have a website or a page of its own. And these websites are well made, updated and cool. All the information that a consumer needs about the variants are presented beautifully. It means that the company is serious about each variant and considers each variant as an independent brand.

For Scooty, these variants serve the purpose of creating excitement in the market.Young girls prefer brands which are fresh and dynamic. Hence by creating new campaigns around such variants brings in lot of freshness to the brand.
Please remember that this brand was born in 1994 and the brand is much more fresh and dynamic than most of the brands launched after it.

Related Brand

TVS Scooty

Dyanora : RIP( 1975 -1995)

Brand : Dyanora
Company : Dynavision

Brand Analysis Count : 378

Dyanora is a brand which evokes lot of nostalgia in me. Dyanora was our first television. I still remember the thrill of watching programs in Dyanora. Thrilled because I no longer needed to plead with my mother to allow me to go and watch TV in our neighbour's house.

Dyanora brand was launched in 1975. The brand belonged to a company known as Dynavision which was JV between Tamilnadu Industrial Development Corporation and the entrepreneur Mr Obul Reddy .

During those periods, there was severe restriction in the manufacturing and selling of TVs because of licence raj. Those companies who got license minted money because of lack of competition.
Dyanora also benefitted out of such limited competition. Dyanora started selling B/W television and in 1982 it launched the Color Television.

The TV marketers started selling real volumes during 1980's when the government started increasing the transmisson towers across the country.
The company was also going to face threat arisng out of the Government's liberal economic policy during the 1980's where the licences for manufacturing TV was given liberally. With the liberal license policy, many small and medium companies started their manufacturing and marketing of television sets.

From a period where Dyanora faced competition from Solidaire and nobody else, things started moving towards a highly competitive scenario.

Dyanora faced competion from large multinational and national players and also from local regional players. It could not sustain itself in that competitive world. The demand also began to go down which inturn affected the profitability.

Dyanora was a highly popular brand. The company also invested in brand building. The brand had the tagline " keep in touch".

Watch the commercial here : Dyanora

The jingle were very popular at that time so was the visuals. I especially liked the dog with spectacle visual.
The lyrics went on like this :

Are you in touch with whats going on
Are you in touch with the latest around
Get in touch with Dyanora
Get the best point of view
and the Sound thats true
stay in touch with the times
keep in touch with the new
Get the latest Dyanora
Keep in Touch.......

The ad was well made and was very popular during that time.

But the brand did not survive. The company also was confused about the future of the brand. Faced with competition from large companies, Dynavision also tried to prefer building a foriegn brand over the home grown Dyanora.

In 1995, the company entered into a JV with French multinational Thomson International to sell their brand in India. With the focus on Thomson , Dyanora was relegated to the backyard. Consumers also preferred national and international brands which resulted in a significant erosion of Dyanora's market.

Finally the company went into BIFR fold in 1999 and later into eternity.

Dyanora was thus a part of history.

Consumer Insight : Please Play it Straight

Today, I got an email from an Indian e-retailer announcing a 50% value-back offer on purchase of any product from their website in the month of February. Greedy as Iam, I decided to check out the website which is owned by a premier media company.

As usual, all these offers comes with the ubiquitous term " Conditions Apply". Of course the company is definitely offering a 50% value back offer but as a consumer, it pays to know a little math.

Here is how the offer works.

When you buy a product from the website, the value-back offer is not given to the customer in cash but by Gift Certificates. The gift certificates are of value Rs 500, Rs 200 and Rs 100.

Ok so far so good.

Here comes the catch..

These gift certificates carry a minimum order value....

That means , a customer has to purchase ( again) a product of a minimum order value inorder to redeem this certificate.

For redeeming Rs 500 gift certificate, you have to make an additional purchase of Rs 2500.
For Rs 200, the additional purchase requirement is Rs 1000 etc.
And these certificates are valid only till March.

Further , you cannot club two gift certificates together.

If I purchase a product worth Rs 10,000,I would have got coupons worth Rs 5000. But if I wanted to redeem those coupons, I must purchase products worth Rs 25000 in the next month.

Frankly speaking, these sales promotions may do more harm to the marketer because there will be customers who may fall into this trap and then repent having given into the greed.Those customers may never come back to the website for purchase.

Is it beneficial to the company ?

In one way, such " Big " offers will prompt many consumers to visit the website. So the site benefits from the traffic generated by such offers. There are also chances that these consumers get attracted by either the price or merchandise and thus becoming a regular user.

In my personal opinion, these offers is akin to exploiting the greed of consumer. It pays more to be playing straight to the consumer. Give a straight discount or a plain cash-back offer rather than offers which puts the consumer into a trap . Make him feel happy about a bargain purchase.If he gets a bargain, he will come back for sure when ever he has money.

In this period, where consumers are wary about making big ticket purchases , these offers lure them into parting with their valuable cash. But if they feel that they got a raw-deal, the consequences will be terrible for the marketer's long term brand equity.

The primary aim of a marketer is to create a customer NOT making a sale.

Brand Update : Tata Safari

Tata Safari has launched a new TVC which further reinforces the " Reclaim your Life " campaign.

Watch the tvc here : Tata Safari

The ad asks a very pertinent question " when you look back in life, what would you remember?" and ends with the tagline - Reclaim your life.

Some of the factors which I liked about this ad was the
Catchy Phrases
Cool Music and
Exotic Locales

Its also interesting to note that the company was bold enough to show the product only at the last shot. That too for a very very small time.
I remember a report on afaqs about the same strategy used for the launch ad for Linea ( read the article here ). The article talks about the usual practice of advertisers using the long drawn product shots and using the entire airtime displaying the product and how the agency convinced Fiat to break this tradition.

It take lots of courage and persuasion to convince the client that some times it is better not to show too much of the product.

Tata Safari should be appreciated for being consistent in their positioning strategy. The brand has been reinforcing the same message but at the same time coming out with fresh ideas about reclaiming the life.

Related Brand

Tata Safari

Unwanted-72 : Bring Your Lost Moments Back

Brand : Unwanted-72

Company : Mankind Pharma

Brand Analysis Count : 377


I-pill now have a competition. Mankind Pharma . Mankind Pharma was established in 1995 and has its presence in antibiotics, ED , Gastro, Antifungal Cardio segments. The company has forayed into the OTC segment with a range of products from sanitary napkins to emergency pills.

Unwanted-72 is a morning-after pill. This emergency contraceptive pill is directly competing with the market leader i-pill from Cipla. I pill is the first OTC emergency contraceptive pill in India. These pills were allowed to market through OTC in 2005.

Unlike other contraceptive pills, emergency contraceptive pills are not a family planning tool. These pills are used to prevent unwanted pregnancy arising out of various situations like unexpected and unprotected intercourse.

I-pill has stirred up the market with a high profile, highly controversial ad campaign. The market has reacted quite positively to the product ever since.
As usual, the moral police of India has been creating lot of noise decrying this product as an anti-moral product. The noise made by these hypocrites have only helped increase the popularity of morning-after pills.

According to a report in Economic Times, 78% of pregnancies in India are unplanned and 5% are unwanted.There are about 1 million unsafe abortions in the country every year. Hence these pills offer a safe way to avoid pregnancy and abortion.

Critics say that the popularity of such emergency contraceptives will give wrong message to youngsters especially teens. These pills often acts as a confidence booster for these youngsters to go wild. These theories are based on the assumption that Indian Youth are the epitome of high moral values...
Another criticism about these products is that the marketers often suppress the information regarding side-effects of these pills.

Coming back to the brand, Mankind has been aggressive in tapping the emerging OTC product market in India. The company has been promoting its Sugar- substitute brand Kalorie 1 heavily using Wasim Akram as the brand ambassador.

Unwanted-72 has an interesting brand name. I was surprised at the brand name when I saw this brand's commercial . First I thought it was naive on the part of the company to name a contraceptive brand as Unwanted -72. The name sounded very amateurish and too theoretical. I thought i-pill was a stylish name compared to unwanted-72.

But later on further thinking, i found lot of logic in using such a brand name. According to text books, brand names have to be simple , easy to understand and remember and should be able to convey the purpose of the brand. If you look at theory , Unwanted-72 is an ideal brand name.

Unwanted denotes Unwanted Pregnancy
72 denotes the hours within which this pill has to be consumed after the intercourse.

So Unwanted-72 makes sense

or does it ?????

Well ... for a lady who is so tense and worried about a possibility of an unwanted pregnancy , does the brand name matters ?

Even if you put the brand name as After-Screwed - Up Pill, consumers will buy it provided it is effective..

My personal opinion is that the brand name is too amateurish .Parents will have tough time explaining it to a kid who sees the ad and asks about the product. In the company point of view , the brand name is so simple and direct, that every one can understand what the product is.If you are targeting a mass market, such a simple brand name is very advantageous.

Related Brand
I-pill