The Real Picture

Dabur Foods fruit juice brand gets a new lease of life with "fresh" properties

A young boy comes home from school. He drops his schoolbag on the floor and loosens his tie. He is clearly exhausted and wants to recharge his energy cells.

He heads straight for the refrigerator where he finds a tall, one-litre pack of Real orange juice.

As he walks past a mirror with the pack in hand, he notices something odd. He has a tetrapak of Real juice in his hand "" that's for sure "" yet he spies something entirely different in the mirror.

So he steps back, flabbergasted because what he sees in the mirror is an image of him holding an orange in his hand, instead of the Real tetraPak. He can't quite understand what's going on, so he decides to test the "mirage".

With a quizzical expression on his face, the boy keeps his eyes on the mirror and moves the Real orange juice pack back and forth with his arm. And in the mirror, he sees an orange being moved back and forth.

So he decides to open the pack of juice but again, what he sees in the mirror is him peeling the skin of an orange. He smiles, no longer in doubt and just drinks the juice; in the mirror, the boy is shown eating an orange.

This is Dabur Foods' latest 25-second television commercial for its Real fruit juice range. The creative execution of this campaign required some cognitive footwork.

"We had our agency do research about five months ago to coincide with the summer this year," says Amit Burman, CEO, Dabur Foods Ltd.

From a market that was worth about Rs 35 crore in 1999, the beverages market is now worth about Rs 120 crore. Dabur's share in this market is about 55 per cent, followed by competitors like Tropicana and Onjus.

Over a month, the agency "" Delhi-based Dhar & Hoon "" met focus groups of about 300 people, mostly mothers who regularly purchase fruit juice "" both Real as well as competing brands.

The agency's brief was to find out from its consumers what they felt they got out of the brand.

The feedback the agency got was that having Real was equivalent to actually eating a fruit. "This study focused on what we gave our consumers; the challenge was to make the message clear in our communication," says Burman.

Agrees Arindam Sengupta, creative director, Dhar and Hoon, "What came out of the study was that the kids loved the taste."

Another insight that emerged was that Real tasted good and lacked the pungent aftertaste often found in other competing brands.

Accordingly, the execution of the campaign was oriented to the message that drinking Real was as good as having an orange.

But the company's communication efforts had been in the process of being reworked before the study had been commissioned.

Since June 2002, the company had been in the process of redesigning its packaging.

From its launch in 1997, the company's tetrapaks showed a tall glass topped with juice, brimming with droplets of water to convey the idea that the beverage was refreshing.

So Dabur hired the services of DMA, a London-based agency specialising in the design of packaging products for the food and beverages sector, to redesign its packaging.

Coupled with the results of the study, Burman says the company wanted to highlight the fact that Real had real juice in it sans preservatives and showcase the same on its packaging.

Now, Real TetraPaks don't have tall glasses "" instead, there are shots of the fruit on the package.

"We relaunched Real to realign the look and feel of the brand more closely with its benefit "" that Real tastes like eating a fruit," says Burman.

Hoon says that although the commercial did not ostensibly target mothers, "We knew that mothers watched all the channels."

But the execution required conceptualisation of the study results in terms that was comprehensible for children "" and mothers.

"First, we thought of using a shadow," says Sengupta. The idea behind that was to display the schoolboy drinking from the Real tetrapak and his two-dimensional shadow eating an orange.

The problem with the idea of using a two-dimensional shadow was that when the schoolboy walked past a mirror, there was the technical complexity of depicting a 2-D shadow.

"Everything had to be seamless," says Sengupta, so that option had to be ruled out.

But why the use of the mirror in the ad? "The mirror highlighted the fact that the kid wasn't sure of what was in the pack. It was a device we used to show that he was interacting with his self," says Hoon.

According to Sengupta, the production was a real challenge. So the agency hired the services of the Australian firm NuVu.

Siddharth Shukla directed the commercial for NuVu, but one particular difficulty was that multiple sources of light had to be masked even if two shots of the boy drinking and eating the orange were taped separately and integrated on one film.

What had to be done was that the schoolkid was shot drinking from the tetrapak in one shot, with a mirror in view.

In a different take, the boy's movements were shot as he ate the orange.

Only his hand movements were cut and electronically pasted seamlessly on to the main sequence "" thereby bypassing the problem of dealing with dual light sources.

"That had to be worked on, frame by frame," says Sengputa. The technical effects for this 25 second advertisment took about 21 days to produce.

Dabur Foods has committed about 13 per cent of its annual turnover to brand spends "" which works out to about Rs 3 crore a year.

With the commercial airing on Zee TV, Star Plus, Discovery and Cartoon Network, the company has largely targeted urban children.

The campaign has been airing since the middle of May, yet company executives are reluctant to comment on the efficacy of the commercial.

A brand track study, scheduled for July, should reveal whether the company's efforts to communicate the reality about its products has cut ice with today's discriminating customers: whether school kids or mothers.