Reworking The Maggi Magic

Nestle hopes to recreate the easy to make and good to eat concept with the launch of Maggi Macaroni.

Will the gamble pay off?

From Milkmaid in the sixties to Milo in the nineties, Nestle India Limited has made a habit of not just launching new brands but creating new product categories. Occasional embarrassments such as Nestea iced tea and energy drink Nesfit notwithstanding, the Rs 1,000-crore multinational has been successful at portfolio management. Nestle can, after all, claim credit for the last decades biggest success story in the convenience food market -- Maggi instant noodles.

But now, Nestle is trying to pump life into this very category it set up. With stagnant sales compounded by fickle taste buds, Nestle is looking at every opportunity to stretch the Maggi brand. To combat brand fatigue, it recently launched Maggi Macaroni snack, a Rs 9 twist-and-curl reincarnation of the Maggi noodle. Can Nestle rework the Maggi magic?

It definitely thinks so. Macaronis target audience is the customer who had tried Maggi noodles, liked it, and subsequently outgrown it. Maggi noodles launched in 1983 was aimed at kids. Subsequently, the target audience outgrew the product. Now, Nestle is hoping to win back this customer with a macaroni offering. It is trying to evoke the intrinsic brand values of the mother brand which encompass convenience, fun and taste, repackaged as a sophisticated product.

On the flip side, macaroni could eat into the market share of noodles. The annual noodle and vermicelli market stands at 60,000 tonne. Of this, macaroni accounting for a mere 16,000 tonne is governed by the unorganised sector.

If the Maggi Macaroni clicks, Nestle could pioneer yet another related product category. And this is a gamble the multinational is willing to take. As a company insider puts it, A leader always attacks himself.

More so, when it can leverage the goodwill of its existing brands. And the Maggi 2-minute noodles has loads of it. No sooner was it launched, Maggi lost no time in expanding its influence in Indian homes. The company, meanwhile, established Maggi as the umbrella brand to introduce a range of ketchups, soups, pickles and seasonings.

This time, like the two-minute noodle, Maggi Macaroni priced at Rs 9 and Rs 11 per pack, (depending on the flavour), takes one cup of water and all of five minutes to become palatable. This is in sync with Maggis easy to make and good to eat concept.

Moreover, market research has revealed that the macaroni is a versatile product. Despite a knowledge gap on the usage of the product, the research findings have shown that in Gujarat, macaroni is added to vegetables and used as an accompaniment to dal and roti.

But for all the market potential, there is a sense of deja vu here: the Maggi Macaroni packet looks suspiciously like that of Maggi Noodles (though the packaging is in red instead of yellow); the television ad campaign tries to create an excitement around the product reminiscent of the Bas do minute appeal of instant noodles; and once again, chicken and masala flavours are being relied upon to please the Indian palate.

This last similarity might just prove to be the Achilles Heel for the readymix snack. Maggi Macaroni is only about as Italian as Maggi Noodles is Chinese. But the customer was not unfamiliar with Indianised Chinese when instant noodles hit the market -- ergo its easy acceptability. Italian cuisine, on the other hand, has never moved out of specialty restaurants into the roadside dhaba. This time around therefore, the very flavours that made Maggi a household name and Chinese food a regular feature in Indian meals could leave a bad taste in the mouth.

Company sources, however, insist that Maggi Macaroni is not a clone of Maggi Noodles. There are subtle differences. To begin with, the quantity of tastemaker has gone up from nine gms in Maggi noodles to 15 gms in the case of Masala Macaroni and 25 gms for the tomato and chicken flavours. Besides, they say that Maggi Macaroni is laced with thick sauce and the flavours are definitely far more pronounced.

This is clearly intended to appeal to the taste buds of the pre-teens and teenage kids who have noodle-eating habits into more contemporary tastes. These youngsters who know their mind and take their own decisions, will obviously find it difficult to stomach the Mummy, mummy bhook lagi hai ad line. The campaign logic for Maggi Macaroni is simple: the way to a teenagers stomach is through his heart.

The sign off Tum roz baby khana is set to the music of Macarena for a generation which dances to the tunes of Los Del Rios. But this is also an age group that identifies with Colonial Cousins and fusion music. The result: Spanish beats are interspersed with strains of Indian

And while mummy does make a customary appearance in the ad to give the product her seal of approval, this time she lingers in the background. Incidentally, Roz is the operative word here which tells the target that Italian food does not require an occasion. Nestles agency Mudra believes that the catch line will prompt the customer to go ahead and eat macaroni as a matter of course.

For the moment, Nestle is content to put all its muscle behind Maggi Macaroni in the Delhi market. Radio spots on Times FM have the same lively jingle of the television ad while banners and hoardings proclaiming Tum Roz Baby Khana are crowding the capitals skyline.

Month-and-a-half after its launch, trial of Maggi Macaroni are soaring. New Delhi-based department store Nanz, for instance, roughly sells 20 packets of Macaroni a day. And at a ballpark estimate, this store sells seven packets of Maggi noodles daily and and only three packets of the Hindustan Lever-backed Indo Nissins Top Ramen Smoodles. So even as Maggi continues to be the market leader with a share of 85 per cent in instant noodles, one cant help wondering if the launch of macaroni was in response to a shrewdly-assessed trend: the sales of instant noodles have reached a plateau.

An industry source reveals that the growth rate of Maggi noodles is now unlikely to go beyond five per cent every year in contrast to the 15 per cent growth during the eighties. Last year, Nestle sold a little over 10,000 tonnes of noodles, an increase of only 1000 tonnes over the preceding year.

Besides, Nestles dealers and distributors gripe that the supply of noodles has become erratic. Making matters worse is an aggressive competitor like Top Ramen. And HLL wastes no time in waging a price war whenever opportunity strikes. And now with foods being a major thrust area for the Anglo-Dutch conglomerate, Nestle is taking no chances.

Says a former Nestle employee, Maggis war with Top Ramen is a size of the stomach war. And who knows, Maggi Macaroni with its extended product usage could well turn out to be the ideal flanking strategy.