Brand Update: Milkybar Attempts Gamification

 Over the last few years, there has been a serious attempt by the milk chocolate brand - Milkybar to chart a new path through activity-based brand engagement. It can be broadly classified as gamification where the game elements are incorporated into the brand and consumption. 

In the earlier campaigns, Milkybar has been focusing on the benefits from its milk ingredient and highlighting the calcium content and the health benefits associated with it. Later there has been a strong focus on bringing in activities through games/puzzles bundled along with the chocolate. This along with celebrity endorsers like Shilpa Shetty is expected to boost the brand's preference. Interestingly, the brand's communication is primarily targeted at the mother rather than the child. The brand has the tagline - Play Eat & Learn.

The brand hopes that the activity bundling will encourage mothers to choose Milkybar over others because of the added benefit ( like children getting smarter !). Milk chocolates are a small segment of the market and it is purely an individualistic choice whether people like this category or not, so marketing makes it much harder since it lacks the universal likeness of ordinary chocolates. The concept of such gamification is good since it engages the consumer ( kids) with the brand beyond just consumption and makes the kid play with the brand longer than usual. It has the potential to create more brand-related outcomes. 

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Good Day Toothpaste: Start Your Day with a Good Day!

 Brand: Good Day Toothpaste

Company: Good Day Oral Care

Brand Analysis Count: #612

It takes a lot of guts to launch an FMCG brand in the time of a pandemic like this. In that sense, what a group of entrepreneurs has done in this pandemic by launching a toothpaste brand is indeed very courageous.

Little is known about the brand Good Day Toothpaste. In fact, a google search has not yielded many results. I came to know about the brand from a television advertisement and thought that Brittannia got crazy and launched a brand extension of Good Day biscuits. 

A search indicated that it is not the case and the brand is from Kerala. 

As a marketer, the first question that comes to mind is the brand name. While Good Day is obviously a nice brand name for toothpaste, why should a firm take a famous biscuit brand name from a big business house?

Technically it is possible that the Good Day brand name is available for the toothpaste category but there may be litigation on the use of such a brand name.  Brands like Amul and Lux are indeed used by hosiery marketers overcoming the legal challenges over trademarks.

Having such a brand name is very helpful because of instant recognition and recall and may prompt some initial adoption because it carries a reputed brand name. But those are very short-term advantages.

The brand doesn't talk much about the key differentiators against its competitors like Colgate or Closeup. The ads just talk about the tagline - Start your day with Good Day. 

Good Day toothpaste comes with three variants - Milky White, Herbal and Meswak. 

The brand also is having Xylitol and hence the brand does not contain sugar. That brings a question as to whether other toothpaste brands have sugar? ( Need to check on that). 

The brand may be testing the waters in some test markets, which may be why information is not there on the internet.

However, the toothpaste market is a highly cluttered and competitive market and an ordinary product will not do any good in this market. To launch a brand in such a market needs a lot of guts and let us see how the brand pans out in the future. 

Brand Update: Domex launches a direct frontal attack against Harpic

 In a very interesting move, HUL's toilet and surface cleaner brand Domex has launched a direct attack on the market leader Reckitt & Benckiser's Harpic brand this season. According to LiveMint, the Indian hygiene market is worth around Rs 38000 crore and the toilet-cleaning market is alone worth Rs 1600 crore. Harpic is the market leader in this segment. 

Domex has been trying to counter the market leader by positioning itself as a germ-killer. With the pandemic scare in place, the hygiene market is expected to grow because of increased customer perception of cleanliness and hygiene. 

This year, Domex has launched a direct frontal attack on Harpic that too with a direct comparative advertisement. The campaign had both print and television commercials. In the campaign, the brand takes the route of additional benefit of the Domex in terms of removing the bad odour caused by germs. This campaign helps the brand to create a powerful point of difference. The current campaign is made for the Domex Freshguard variant. 

The ad will likely be challenged by Harpic but Domex will be riding on the benefit of the punch delivered by this comparative advertisement until that time.

Research on comparative advertisement effectiveness has suggested that such advertising is effective in generating favourable responses in terms of attitude and brand consideration for the sponsoring brand. Comparative ads can be positive and negative. Positive comparative ads try to convince the customers about the superiority of the sponsor brands while negative comparative ads try to tell the consumers what they lose by using the competing brand. Research suggests that in the case of direct comparative ads, the negative comparison works better. 

For Harpic, the logical next move would be to neutralize the Domex claims quickly rather than wait for the ads to be taken down. 

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Brand Update: Crispello New Ad Shows a Subtle Shift in Positioning

 Cadbury's new brand of chocolate-covered wafer finger product- Crispello has launched a new campaign. What is interesting about the campaign is that there is a subtle shift in the positioning of the brand. If you remember the launch ad for the brand, the theme was that five young persons were driving the car and they hatch a plan not to share the chocolate with the fifth person since there are only four Crispello fingers. 

The new ad takes the theme forward with a twist where the three robbers wake up the dude so that Crispello can be shared since the brand says that equal sharing is a must. Not sure whether this positive twist is intended, however positively always helps in branding. However, the creative quality (IMHO) is below par when compared with the usual Cadbury ads. With the market leader KitKat running high decibel campaigns with celebrities, Crispello has to up the game to a different level. 

Agile Marketing/Marketing Agility

Marketing Agility or Agile Marketing is a concept from Project Management adapted to the marketing domain. The concept talks about the ability of the firm to make sense of the environment and rapidly iterate the plans from the feedback after execution.