The positioning dilemma!

Al Ries and Jack Trout made the concept of ‘positioning’ popular with their seminal book ‘Positioning – a battle for your mind’. They persuasively argue that the position that the brand occupies in the customer’s mind is more important than the position it occupies in the retailer’s shelf. What the customer thinks about the product is the only thing that matters. For example when asked “Which is the soap that celebrities use?” Most people would say Lux.

And they would say it without any hesitation or a pause. And when asked about “a gift for someone you love” the answer that pops up is Cadbury. That is the power of positioning! Paradoxically both product categories are not very essential. That is they are not staples. Staples are products that we need to consume to survive like rice, cereals and other daily use products.

Marketers have made products like chocolates and bath soaps appear to be essential products with their powerful and persuasive promotion. Interestingly, both Cadbury and Lux use different positioning strategies. Cadbury believes in changing the positioning tack with the changing times while Lux has consistently used the same positioning tack – the beauty soap used by film stars with a tag line ‘filmi sitaron ka soundarya rahasya’ (Film stars beauty secret). Let us examine both positioning strategies in detail.

Cadbury India repositioning strategy: Cadbury India Ltd. is a part of Mondelēz International. Cadbury India operates in five categories – chocolate confectionery, beverages, biscuits, gum and candy. In the chocolate confectionery business, Cadbury has maintained its undisputed leadership over the years. Some of its key brands are Cadbury Dairy Milk (CDM), Bournvita, 5 Star, Perk, Bournville, Celebrations, Gems, Éclairs, Bubbaloo, Tang and Oreo.

Cadbury chocolates have been a favorite with the Indians. The brand repositioning which the company has tried out has been very interesting. CDM is for the kid in you: In the early days, the CDM (Cadbury Dairy Milk) brand had a huge fan following among kids. In order to build stronger appeal among older age groups, the brand repositioned itself through the ‘Real Taste of Life’ campaign in 1994.

The campaign positioned Cadbury Dairy Milk as the chocolate that awakened the little child in every grown up. CDM is for all occasions: With the launch of the Rs. 5 pack in 1998, CDM became more affordable and hence more accessible for the masses. The ensuring positioning of ‘khaane waalon ko khaane ka bahana chahiye’ (people will use any excuse to eat CDM) made consumption into a joyful, social occasion.

CDM is a substitute for Indian sweets: In 2004, the `kuch meetha ho jaaye’ campaign was launched, seeking to increase CDM consumption by making it synonymous with traditional Indian sweets (mithai). CDM as a dessert: With the campaign ‘khaane ke baad meethe mein kuch meetha ho jaaye’, Cadbury’s aim was to introduce the thought of having a CDM as a post dinner meetha (dessert).

In the year 2010, the `shubh aarambh’ campaign was launched, taking inspiration from the traditional Indian custom of having something sweet before embarking on a new activity or doing something new. Cadbury gems for the kid in you: The 2011 campaign “raho umarless” celebrates the kid in all of us. The advertisement talks about two old men unabashedly exchanging toys that they get with a pack of Cadbury GEMS.

Recently Cadbury has tried a new repositioning strategy. They have changed Cadbury Eclairs name to Cadbury Choclairs. The think tanks of Cadbury seem to believe that their USP are the words Cadbury and Chocolate and they don’t want brand dilution. Thus they reinforced the word Choclairs along with the word Cadbury. But there’s a small concern? The category is called an Éclair.

Is it possible that Cadbury is opening a bit of the door for the competition to jump in and use the word Eclair? Lux soap, the soap used by film stars – the positioning tack that has not changed at all: Lux, a product of Hindustan Lever Limited made its entry into India in 1929 and its early advertisements featured Hollywood actresses and later they were replaced by Bollywood stars.

Every film star from the Indian film industry has been starring in the Lux advertisement. Starring in a Lux advertisement has become a “must-do” thing for the female stars. Every aspiring starlet has been making it her career goal to appear in the Lux advertisement.

In that sense it has become a kind of a benchmark for success and a way of announcing their arrival in the industry. Devika Rani may have been one of the foremost stars of early talkies cinema but in 1941 the distinction of being the first Lux model went to her contemporary, Leela Chitnis.

Lux can be seen as one of the earliest forms of celebrity endorsements. The vast majority of actresses who appeared in the Lux advertisements were drawn from the Bombay film industry. As a product, however, that reached the entire country, regional advertising was critical to the success of Lux. Thus well-known stars of Bengali, Tamil, and Telugu cinema also regularly found place in Lux advertisements that were prominently featured in the popular Filmfare magazine.

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Even the leading "vamps" of the Bombay film industry like Helen too appeared in the advertisements. Lux campaign thus highlighted and awarded female performance of all kinds. Film stars actively solicited the Lux campaign. At that time film journalism was not as prolific as it became later and Lux advertisements were one of the best ways for the film stars to get publicity.

Levers advertised throughout the year and its advertisements traveled all over the country, printed not just in magazines but on soap wrappers, boxes, posters and on billboards. Like autographed postcards, Lux with its signed endorsements could be seen as a form of circulating portraits with a much wider reach.

Moreover the stars looked their best in these pictures as their portraits were taken by skilled photographers. Worked on by equally skilled artists, in later years they involved stylists and makeup artistes to create the glamorous star persona of Lux. Lux campaign was the company’s acknowledgement that the actress had become a star and the star thanking the product for the same.

There can be no better example of symbiotic relationship. Lux gets benefited by the star presence and getting featured in a Lux advertisement enhanced and established the actor’s position. It was the award of the awards. It was the top most star endorsing the number one brand in India.

This prolific campaign was possible because stars did not get paid for an appearance in the initial years. For the film producers, the campaign worked as free publicity for their productions. By the late fifties the advertisements would feature information about the name, production credits and costume of the current film that the actress endorsed.

By the 1970s Lux lost its exclusive edge with competition from various other brands. Photographic advertising would eventually turn other kinds of faces into celebrities, but Lux toilet soap continued to remain faithful to its cinema stars. Finding a space outside the pages of magazines to a presence in cinema trailers and television, Lux had become a key brand sponsoring beauty and fashion contests by the 1990s.

Lux campaign continues to bank on the popularity of the female star and its one time attempt to change this using Shahrukh Khan (for the metrosexual male) in a bathtub of petals was not very successful.

By:Dr M Anil Ramesh