Dollops : RIP (1989-1995)

Brand : Dollops
Company : Cadbury/HLL


Brand Analysis : 403

Dollops is another MNC brand that bite the dust in Indian market. This much hyped brand was launched in India in 1989 by Cadbury's in association with Brooke Bond. Dollops was one of the first high profile MNC brands to enter the Indian market.

Dollops gained instant consumer interest because of the endorsement from Cadbury's. The brand was positioned as a premium icecream and was able to make a significant hype during the launch.

Ice cream business at that time was dominated by local players and powerful brands like Kwality. Cadbury later found that the market was not as juicy as it thought to be. During 1993, Cadbury began the process of focusing more on its confectionery business.

This lead to the hiving off the unrelated businesses like ice creams. It was around that time Hindustan Lever Ltd began to aggressively pursue their interest in ice cream market. In an acquisition spree, HLL acquired Kwality and Dollops. Cadbury sold Dollops to HLL in 1993.

Typically, HLL played around with the brands it had acquired. HLL had its international Wall's brand which it was planning to launch along with Kwality and Dollops. HLL found that Kwality had a huge equity in the market and decided to keep that brand .

Dollops could not be fit into the planned portfolio strategy of HLL and had to be killed.By around 1995, Dollops was slowly eased out from the market.

Dollops had only a short life in the Indian market. Dollops shot into limelight only because of the Cadbury's brand endorsement. The brand was in a tough market which had even humbled the mighty HLL. For Cadbury's, Dollops became a liability when it chose to concentrate on its core business. For HLL, it was a costly exercise of killing a competing brand.

Dollops is a brand that failed not because of any product related reasons. Some of the flavors of Dollops were a hit with the consumers. It failed because of company related factors.

Picture courtsey : Business Line

Brand Update : Chlormint

Chlormint is back in the media space with a new campaign. There are two interesting things about the new campaign.

First is that, the brand has now a celebrity endorser ( infact two !) . Chlormint has signed up Bollywood Actor Salman Khan as the brand ambassador. The new tvc features Salman and his brother Sohail Khan.

Watch the Tvc Here : Chlormint Airplane Ad

The second most important development about this brand is the tagline. The brand has brought back the old famous tagline " Dobara Mat Poochna " . Chlormint had earlier changed the tagline to " Khao Kabhi Bhi ". I had criticized about the unnecessary change in the tagline in my earlier update about the brand. I had argued that the new tagline does not have lasting power and dumping " Dobara Mat Poochna " was a mistake.

The brand has made some changes in the tagline. The new tagline is " Bina Tayaari ke Dobara mat poochna " meaning " Don't Ask with out taking adequate preparation ". It is good that Chlormint decided to bring back the tagline that made this brand famous. It was a beautiful tagline with lot of room for creativity. The tagline also became a much used phrase by the youngsters.

I am little surprised by the brand's move to rope in a celebrity endorser. The question is whether Chlormint really need the support of a brand ambassador ? My personal opinion is that Chlormint have the strength to survive on its own. Any brand ambassador will only dilute the strength of this brand.

One reason for taking a celebrity is the category competitor Orbit taking Deepika as the brand ambassador. May be Chlormint felt threatened by this move.

The new TVC featuring Salman and Sohail is a pathetic one . The agency could have used this duo better. There is nothing funny or remarkable about the new TVC.

The brand could have fared better if it had concentrated on itself rather than on the celebrity.




Related Brand

Chlormint

Picture courtesy
Tarik Jilai Flickr Photostream

Brand Update : Lays

Lay's is on a repositioning mode again. The brand is currently running a new campaign with a new tagline " Be a little Dillogical ".

Dillogical is the new manthra for the brand. The newly coined term represents the logic of the heart ( I think So !). The new campaign with the new tagline how ever does not speak much about the new positioning.

Ever since the brand dropped its famous " No one can eat just one " tagline, Lays has never really caught the consumer's share of mind. None of the campaign with the tagline " Har Program Ka Main Food " really was as effective as the previous campaigns.

In my last post about this brand, I had criticized about the decision to change a famous tagline just for the sake of change . I think the brand never found its soul in the " program ka main food " tagline. This may have created the need for a new tagline.

I don't think that the Dillogical tagline is going to be any better than the last one. Pepsi is obsessed with Hinglish words , the recent one being Youngisthan.

In sheer share of voice and creativity, Bingo has clearly outsmarted Lays. The campaigns of Bingo has always been clutter- breaking and funny. Lays never was able to bring out a classy campaign after its repositioning.

Related Brand
Lays

Colin : Cleans To A Shine

Brand : Colin
Company : Reckitt & Benckiser

Brand Analysis Count : 402

Colin is a brand from Reckitt & Benckiser. This brand is the market leader in glass cleaner product category. One can say that Colin is the pioneer in creating this category.

Colin brand was created by a company known as Fern Hill Laboratories ltd. In 1998, this brand was sold to Reckitt & Colman ( which later became Reckitt & Benckiser).

Glass cleaner market is a small market with a size of 20 crore. Colin commands more than 70 % of the market . This brand is an example of a niche brand. One good thing about Colin is that the brand owner has left this brand as a niche brand and so far has not ventured into extending Colin into other product categories.

The typical issue with the niche brand is the market size. In a country like India with its sheer size and diversity, managing a niche brand often is a difficult affair.

Consider the case of Colin. The brand is a national brand with presence over most of the urban market. But the brand has to manage the challenge of distributing to all those numerous urban market for a share of those 20 crore. Since Colin is a part of Reckitt which has a basket of products, the cost will be shared. For a company having only one niche brand, Indian market is indeed a tough market to crack.

Colin was always perceived to be a premium product. From my experience as a middle class customer, we never perceived Colin as an essential product. Although we had all the products that could be cleaned using this cleaner, we never felt the need for Colin.

Now the situation is different. The number of electronic gadgets has increased, consumers now have LCD monitors, computers, ipods, psp etc which require specialist cleaning solutions. Hence more than ever, Colin has a good potential in this era.

Colin in a way also suffered from narrow positioning . The brand is widely perceived as a glass cleaner, actually it can be used as a multi-purpose cleaner for fridge and other gadgets. Hence when a consumer has a view that Colin is a glass cleaner, the usage and the value for money proposition does not match. In my experience as a consumer, I never bought this product because of this thought " To clean a TV, why should I spent this much ? "

It is also true that being perceived as a specialist for glass cleaning has its own advantages. The brand is considered an expert in that category and is almost generic to that category.

Colin is a brand that is well entrenched in the minds of the consumers. Being a niche brand has prevented heavy media support for Colin. But the brand has huge potential in days to come. The brand has to take a risk and try to create more uses for this product.

Brand Update : Liril

After a long long time, the iconic Liril is back. Yesterday I saw the new tvc for Liril. The campaign looks foreign, complete with foreign models and settings.

The new tvc talks about 2000 points in our body which when touched will refresh us!!!! The ad uses the theme of a playful interaction between a father and baby to drive home the power of touch and these 2000 sensitive body points.

The ad claims that using Liril will rejuvenate those 2000 body points to keep you FRESH...

Well... some brands will never learn from mistakes. After the dumping of the famous imagery of Liril girl and the waterfall, the brand has never recovered. The fall of this iconic brand was accelerated by some stupid campaigns like Uff Umma and mindless product-line extensions like Orange Liril.

Now comes another half-hearted attempt to rejuvenate the brand. Although the new ad has a touch of class, it does not gel with the brand image of Liril that we had in our mind.

Another interesting development is that the entire product has also being changed. The brand packaging has been changed to dark green and the shape of the soap is changed to rectangle.

I still don't understand why the brand has not thought about bringing back its iconic positioning on freshness and its brand element of waterfall and still famous music. I am not saying that the brand should exactly replicate the earlier ads but it can creatively take advantage of that brand image which is still there in the consumer's mind.

Liril's consumers has become old and the new generation does not know much about this brand. But the collective memory and images are still there in the consumer space. It is also interesting to note that no other brand has been able to take up the space of Liril. So there is still lot of opportunity for Liril but going by the new campaign, that opportunity has been wasted miserably.

As a consumer , I still miss this soap.



Related brand
Liril

Brand Update : Eveready

After a long period of silence, Eveready is back on the media space. The brand has launched a new campaign in 2009.The new campaign, known as The Red Light Painters in the ad world , is already making noise among the advertising community.

Watch the ad here : The Redlight Commercial

One of the welcome development with the new campaign is that Eveready has gone back to the famous classic tagline " Give Me Red". Earlier, Eveready has changed its iconic tagline to ' Kuch to hai extra".
The current campaign is for Eveready Ultima batteries.

Frankly speaking , I did not understand the new Eveready commercial. The commercial started with the message that it was made entirely from LED lights, torches and camcoders. And then there was a mouse and the Eveready cat ..... Finally the cat caught the mouse.. That is what I understood.

Today Afaqs carried a story on the new commercial. Read it here.

Only then I understood that there was a story behind the commercial. According to afaqs, the brand is targeting the 15-25 yr olds. May be I did not understood because I am not in the TG.

My feeling is that the new commercial does not tell anything to the consumers. There is no compelling story about Eveready and how the brand is different from its competitors.

The brand is going to face a critical survival issue in future. More and more products are now running on rechargable batteries. Except for clocks and torches, most products which used disposable batteries are now being used with rechargable batteries. For products like clocks, consumers are not too worried about the brand. They will choose any of the major players rather than be loyal.

So in such a scenario, Eveready should be chalking out a survival strategy. It is not about the brand but about the product category.
In my case as a consumer, let me give you the list of products that run on battery in my house : Three clocks
Two remotes
Two Torches

While the new age products like cameras, Ipods, Mobiles,laptops are using rechargable batteries that comes bundled with the product.
In such a scenario, the market for non-rechargable battery market will be limited to a certain households and certain products. There are chances that the entire category getting extinct in future .
I personally think that Eveready is suffering from marketing myopia. The brand has not forayed into mobile batteries or laptop batteries. India is a big market for mobile phones. And typically the batteries need to be replaced. But never seen the brand venturing into this market dominated by chinese makes.

Even in the rechargable segment , Eveready has not done anything to expand the market. These areas may drive the business in future. If the brand is focusing on urban market, without a presence in these segments, I doubt how the brand will survive focusing on the traditional non rechargable batteries.

How ever, I am glad that the " Give Me Red " is back .

Related Brand
Eveready