The art of the makeover

Brands today are repositioning with increasing frequency, but doing so can be tricky.

In the 1980s, Onida, the consumer durables brand, relied on envy as a selling pitch. By the nineties, it was about the technological superiority of its products.

Now, Onida has changed tack again: "envy" is back, though without the trademark devil of 20 years ago.

Like Onida, there are several brands re-assessing their identities as competition transforms markets with chameleon-like regularity. It would be no exaggeration to say that repositioning has become the Indian brand managers' most potent marketing weapon.

"As competition increases, brands have to be more sharply defined," says Pranesh Misra, president and chief operating officer of ad agency, Lowe India. Take the toilet soap category, for instance.

In 1998, there were 148 toilet brands in the Indian market. Now, this number has increased to 235-odd brands. It's no surprise that the bigger soap brands like Lifebuoy and Cinthol have repositioned themselves in recent times.

More competition is one part of the story; the other is the manner in which brands can remain relevant with changing market conditions.

"What the brand stands for needs to keep reflecting the times," says Bharat Puri, managing director, Cadbury India, which altered the positioning of its best-selling Cadbury Dairy Milk (CDM).

If marketers believe that frequent repositioning is crucial for a brand to stay alive, they don't always know what works. Consider the biggest challenge a brand under repositioning faces "" retaining its core values.

"While repositioning a brand the eternal values should not change at any cost," says Shripad Nadkarni, vice-president, marketing, Coca-Cola India.

Onida is a brand that managed to stick to these ground rules. Even as the other big Indian brands in the television segment "" Videocon and BPL "" are struggling for market share, Onida has clawed its way back to number three after being lower down the order in the mid- to late- nineties.

When Onida was launched in the mid-1980s, colour televisions were a luxury, giving customers a sense of pride. Onida's positioning reflected these sentiments and hence the baseline "Neighbour's envy, owner's pride".

To profile this, Onida came up with the mascot of a devil (played on TV by model co-ordinator David Whitbread) whose arrow-tipped tail became the signature on Onida ads.

For a while, this worked and the strong brand recall kept Onida among the top three TV brands. As penetration of colour televisions increased substantially, pride of ownership was no longer an engaging proposition.

As the communication was no longer relevant, it was reflected in the market share, which plunged to 15 per cent in 1996-97 from 20 per cent in 1991-92.

Clearly, Onida needed something new without jettisoning its plank of wicked humour.

Thus, in the late nineties, Onida commercials emphasised product attributes like sound clarity (crucial because Indian consumers play their TVs loud). The ad of a man enjoying a song-and-dance routine on television while his wife decamps with the chauffeur was one such.

The ads, though widely recalled, failed to provide Onida with leverage. There were two reasons.

First, product parity was an emerging issue in the consumer durables industry. Merely talking about technology wouldn't work unless the brand acquired a premium image.

Second, the previous commercials were for individual products like the KY Thunder or Black series. So, Onida needed to project a single benefit to bind the individual propositions.

Also, the new proposition needed to be extended to other durables like DVDs and air-conditioners. This was crucial from a competitive viewpoint too; Samsung and LG had managed to achieve these objectives with their "Digitall" anD "health" propositions respectively.

In mid-2003, Onida dug into research for an answer. Interaction with 15 - 20 focus groups indicated that while "envy" was still associated with Onida, its definition had changed from the 1980s, when it was an in-your-face attribute.

In the current context, the consumer did not like to be projected as seeking envy. But if envy was a by-product of the brand it did not matter. Hence, Onida's modified positioning "" "Onida may cause envy".

But there were risks associated with this new stance. Says V Chandramouli, vice president, sales, marketing and service, Mirc Electronics, "The consumer could assume we were going back to the past because we were unable to compete in the present."

To mitigate this perception the company showcased its new-age products like DVDs and flat screen televisions in its commercials. According to the research, if brands caused envy in the 1980s, it was products that did so in the 1990s.

So, Onida made its products the centrepiece of every ad. For example, in an ad for Onida DVD players, a dog starved for attention, scratches the CD to prevent its owner from viewing it.

"The key distinction was to not show the protagonist as seeking envy," says Chandramouli. The strategy has helped Onida. With a market share of 11.5 per cent, Onida is the third-largest player in the Indian CTV market, up from the fifth slot in the late-1990s, when it did away with the devil.

If Onida's devil enjoyed star status initially, the music channel MTV got it wrong in its first shot at the Indian market. When MTV was launched as a stand-alone channel in the mid-1990s (prior to this, it was aired on a two-hour slot on Doordarshan), a limited number of viewers favoured an all-international music channel.

This contradicted the dynamics of the media business where numbers are crucial to attract ratings and hence, advertising revenues. MTV realised it was out of tune with India.

"We were not connecting with the youth. So we decided to relook at the entire composite mix of the channel," says Vikram Raizada, vice president-marketing, MTV Networks, India.

As a result, in 1997 everything from music to promos to the veejays was overhauled "" 70 per cent of the music played was converted to Hindi and the channel promos sported the made-in-India label.

For instance, series like the "lift man" or "Gaseous Clay" overshadowed internationally acclaimed promos like Beavis and Butthead.

MTV also used the baseline "Enjoy" as opposed to other previous aggressive appeals like "I want my MTV", "Do you get it?" and so on.

The result "" a TAM media research report across the six top metros (Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad) rates MTV as the number one music channel for 229 weeks out of the 249 weeks (January 1999-October 2003) in the age group of 15 to 34 years.

MTV's makeover worked because it was simply rectifying bad mistakes it made at the beginning. But what do you do when there's nothing intrinsically wrong with your positioning but the market stagnates?

This is an issue that Cadbury struggled with Cadbury Dairy Milk (CDM), its flagship brand. CDM was always positioned as an expression of parental love.

By the early 1990s, the chocolate market started stagnating. For Cadbury, this was a serious issue because chocolates account for 74 per cent of the company's turnover (and CDM would constitute roughly half of that).

Says Puri, "Category stagnation was the trigger for repositioning CDM. Being the leader we had to take the call and induce freshness by repositioning the brand."

In 1995, CDM expanded its target audience from children to adults. From encouraging adults to buy a CDM pack for their children ("Cadbury says it better than words"), the brand was repositioned as the "Real taste of life", which addressed adults in a different way: it talked about setting free the child in you.

Puri also points out that in the process, the core essence of the brand "" the pure pleasure of eating chocolate "" never changed. The result? Between 1995 to date, CDM nearly doubled its market share from 16 per cent to 28 per cent, with the market registering 6 to 8 per cent growth rates.

While many brands have managed to get their repositioning right the first time, some brands are still trying to strike the winning combo. One example is the toilet soap brand, Cinthol. The biggest repositioning of the brand took place in 2001, when it started to face perception problems.

Says R K Sinha, vice president (soaps division), Godrej Consumer Products (GCPL), "While Cinthol was positioned as a family soap, it gained a masculine image over the years."

This was mainly because of endorsements by macho male celebrities like Vinod Khanna and Imran Khan in the 1980s.

"Though we never positioned Cinthol as a macho brand, our use of icons perhaps strongly suggested that. This image was limiting the consumer franchise," says Sinha.

But back in the 1980s this made sense as the man was the decision maker for buying products like soaps. When this responsibility shifted to the woman in the 1990s, GCPL was caught on the wrong foot.

As a result, Cinthol's market share slipped from 4.4 per cent in 1997-98 to 2.3 per cent in volume in 2001-02.

To be sure, Godrej's efforts at softening the image had begun in the mid-1990s, when Ambience D'Arcy (now Ambience Publicis), creative agency for the brand till 2001, shifted the brand communication to "body confidence", extending it to female users.

To squarely target female users, GPCL also launched the Scent Fresh range of soaps with floral extracts in 1997. However, after a lacklustre response, the range was withdrawn.

In 2001, Cinthol was repositioned as a unisex brand to bring urban women into the fold, followed by launching a variant "" Cinthol Skin Fresh, with orange extracts.

To reinforce the brand's new proposition, a female mnemonic was added to the packaging. This created a new "" and opposite "" problem for Cinthol in that it alienated male customers. Then, the brand was extended to deodorants, again targeted at women.

Analysts say the brand tried to do too much in too little time. As a result, even the new extensions like deodorants suffered (see The Strategist Brand Derby, September 17, 2002).