Tea board plans blitzkrieg to boost consumption

The Tea Board of India plans massive advertising campaign to revamp brand 'tea' and boost its consumption in the country.

Television campaigns in Hindi and Tamil are already on air and the brand will soon be advertised in the print media. The Rs 10-crore ad campaign has tagline 'Definitely tea drinkers' to associate tea with Indian robustness and warmth.

"We want to change the fuddy duddy image of tea where it is identified with old people, as a morning drink or grocery item. The board promotes tea overseas in a big manner so we thought why not promote it internally too?"said Basudeb Banerjee, chairman of the Tea Board of India.

Due to increasing coffee outlets such as Cafe Coffee Day, Barista, Costa Coffee and Coffee World, the beverage is identified as youth drink and carries a style statement. It also has strong and aggressive marketing backup.

The domestic coffee consumption has shot up from 50,000 tonne to 70,000 tonne in the decade between 1993 and 2003, of which 30 per cent rise took place after 2000. Tea remains the dominant drink of the masses and garners much less revenue and its consumption hovered around the 750,000 tonne in the last three years.

The provisional figure for 2006 according to the Tea Board is 779,000 tonne.

Ogilvy & Mather's group Creative Director, Sumanto Chattopadhyay, who created the TV ads said, "This is a bold step by a government body. It is an attempt to create a new image of tea for the post liberalisation generation which has many options in beverages."

"The country is the largest producer and consumer of tea but the per capita consumption is really low. The strategy is to spike this up", said Banerjee.

The print campaign would continue the drive through out the year. "The print ads are information and awareness based. They will talk about tea, its kinds, receipes etc while the TV ads are humour-centric. We have earmarked Rs 10 crore for the internal promotions and Rs 30 crore for the markets abroad this year", he added.

On threat of coffee wave Banerjee said, "I won't call it a turf protection tactic. Our campaign is for natural beverages. It is not anti-coffee."

"In Wednesday's world, no marketer can afford to sit back. Even though tea remains the number one drink in the country, the promotions are basically a counter measure," he added.

While O&M has done the TV commercials, Lowe is incharge of the international campaign.

The board is still scouting for an agency for its print campaign.