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Yehi
Hai NutriChoice, Baby!
Health
is health and taste is taste, insist the sceptics but Vinita Bali, managing
director at Britannia is upbeat that the twain can meet
Almost
seven years ago, Vinita Bali met Brand Equity to discuss her game plan for
Britannia. She'd taken charge after several years of working overseas for
Coca-Cola, and at marketing consultancy the Zyman Group. In 2005, brand
Britannia had lost some of its mojo, being trounced when it came to
exciting products by new and nimble competitors like ITC's Sunfeast. Bali
admitted candidly at the time, "This was a company that was very
innovative. For the last three or four years, it did not use this ability.
We are beginning to use that muscle again."
Cut to the present and the competitive scenario is
if anything, even more challenging. Homegrown rivals like Parle, ITC and
Priya Gold are still going strong. Brands like Kraft's Oreo and United
Biscuits McVitie's which used to be mainstays of 'import' food stores are
now starting to make their presence felt across the retail spectrum.
Against this backdrop Britannia has clocked fairly impressive growth. If it
had a turnover of 1,666 crore in 2004, its total revenue at the close of
financial year 2012 was 4,974.19 crore — a three-fold increase over eight
years.
Brands in the health and nutrition space have been
among the growth drivers according to Britannia. That the charge would be
driven in part by Milk Bikis and Marie Gold comes as no surprise. Both
brands have been in the Britannia stable for decades. Industry sources
claim they command a share of approximately 55% and 50% respectively in
their categories. The dark horse is NutriChoice, which apparently accounts
for nearly 75% of an admittedly small but rapidly growing health snacks
niche.
The change started according to Bali when the
management looked at Britannia's tagline Swasth Khao, Tanman Jagao aka Eat
Healthy, Think Better. It had been conceived of in 1997 by former Britannia
managing director and CEO Sunil Alagh. Speaking of its genesis, Alagh says
it lay in representing a change from a mere biscuit company to a food
company which included breads, cakes, cheese and milk. He elaborates,
"It also needed to represent a major thrust in the mass glucose
biscuit market, with Tiger. A contemporary image was essential, so I
appealed to the Indian psyche to create a distinct position which not only
played on taste ie a healthy stomach leads to better thinking. It was a
combination of mind and body." The other option was 'Eat Heathy, Live
Better', but 'Think Better' finally made the cut since "living"
was more ostentatious and related to the body as opposed to
"thinking" which connected to the mind. Says Alagh, "It
worked beautifully and propelled Britannia to the Number 1 food brand in
India through Tiger and its new positioning." While many new bosses
have been known to jettison slogans and marketing concepts from a previous
regime, Bali believed the tagline was in fact being underutilised: "The
light bulb went off when we said we have a fabulous slogan but it's just a
slogan so far. For us the challenge was how do we convert "swasth
khao" to a brand credo that gets activated?"
Britannia's initial approach to health under Bali
was radically different. Plans were afoot for the national rollout of a
milk based drink named Anlene. Initially launched in the East, it was aimed
specifically at women, to combat osteoporosis. However Anlene didn't go
beyond the test market stage. Team Britannia began to learn that while
health concerns were on the rise, the Indian consumer's mindspace was
dominated by more common killers: diabetes and heart disease. Explaining a
problem and then offering a solution was a task that the biscuit giant did
not feel equal to. Says Bali, "When you ask 'am I using the assets I
have in the most effective and productive manner?' you get to where we got
to. We opted to use what we have whether a brand, consumer insight or way
to market and suffuse that with health propositions."
An obvious option to build the health platform was
NutriChoice. It was an umbrella brand started long before Bali came on
board to bunch niche products together and thus save on ad budgets. Its
main representation was a staid thin arrowroot biscuit sold primarily in
the east. However the team at Britannia decided to build on the health
positioning inherent in the brand name. Says Bali, "We figured there
was something with this brand and something happening with consumers who
were seeking products that are healthier." The initial option was to
create sugar free biscuits for diabetics. However as Bali points out,
"As we delved deeper, we found what they are seeking is not just sugar
free but something that keeps sugar levels constant." It made Britannia
look afresh at ingredients like oats and ragi, known to have a low
glycaemic index. It spurred the creation of a more sachet based package
design as opposed to the large boxes that NutriChoice used to be sold in,
to make it easy to transport and keep within reach. The main lesson
according to Bali is "The building of a brand goes far beyond the most
obvious." The brand currently has multigrain, digestive and oats based
variants, besides spinning off into finger food with NutriChoice Thins and
the general mixture or pouring range with NutriChoice Multigrain Roasty.
After a project with the UN as a part of the World
Food Programme, during which Britannia worked to the recipe of a calorie
and nutrition dense biscuit, Bali decided on starting the Britannia
Nutrition Foundation. She says, "I hate the word social in CSR; it
simply has to be corporate responsibility. We tried to build this into our
business model so it's not just a question of writing a cheque which stops
when the funds stop." Britannia has fortified its regular portfolio of
biscuits with iron in its flagship Tiger brand, and extended iron and
vitamins to brands like Milk Bikis, Marie and even bread. It also focussed
on "removing
the bad while adding the good", as Bali puts it. The company claims a
lead among food brands in India for raising awareness about and eliminating
trans fats from its recipes.
Health, says marketing consultant Shripad Nadkarni,
founder of MarketGate is a fairly bankable concept to build brands around:
"It has grown on the back of increased health concerns through
education and better information. This awareness is across categories and
not just restricted to food. Advertising has also driven curiosity and
preference for healthy options." And there's lots of elbow room to
grow considering India's per capita consumption of biscuits is a mere 2
kilos per person, lower than even Sri Lanka which consumes double the
quantity. However there are some sceptics — notable among them being the
man who coined 'Eat Healthy, Think Better.' Alagh believes health is one of
the most overused terms in Indian marketing, flogged by everyone from the
durables to the food industry. He says, "Snacking is never meant for
people who want health. It's mainly taste driven and if in that, there's some
element of health, that's great. If the total organised snacking market is
between 14,000 crore and 15,000 crore, I think the sales of products on a
health platform will not be above 400 crores. People say it's growing at
50% and 60% — but on what base?" The trouble is when researched no
consumer will claim to be averse to a healthy product but when it comes to
the crunch, indulgence generally wins the day. Adds Nadkarni, "The
role of health in many of these indulgence categories is one of
permissibility. When you want a chip and it says 'baked, not fried' you are
likely to be reassured. But if I am in the mood to have chips, I'm not
going to give up the taste needs. Hence the holy grail of finding taste
with health benefits."
According to one of Britannia's arch rivals in the marketplace, healthy
snacks still have a long way to go. The roadblocks include the taste
challenge: consumers preferring fried snacks over so called 'diet options'.
Says Mayank Shah, group product manager at Parle Products: "Health
snacks is growing at a rapid 35%-40% but from a very small base. It will be
some time before the category achieves scale and evolves." Parle does
have a couple of healthy snack products like digestive Marie biscuits and
sugar-free cream crackers, but these are small. "These products cater
to consumers looking for functional health benefits, but that segment has a
long way to go," he adds. These launches happened around three years
back and even if there are more products on the anvil, they won't be the
marketer's immediate priority.
The two need not be mutually exclusive, though.
Bali points to several products from nature like fruits that straddle the
two aspects with no contradiction. She says, "It's lazy to think that
healthy cannot be tasty. The thing to do is challenge yourself and the
product development team to say I want health and taste. It's the same as
saying what is cheap cannot be functionally good. The electronics industry
broke that myth entirely. Today I can buy a DVD player for 2,500 and its runs
brilliantly."
Beyond Crunch Time
While biscuits still account for 80% of
Britannia's business, the company is in the middle of a serious push behind
other aspects like dairy, bread and cake. It's driven quite simply by the
need to make Britannia more relevant to the consumer and increase
consumption opportunities. Biscuits are and will always be a tea time or
between meals snack. But according to Vinita Bali, "As a biscuit
company, you don't really have anything relevant at the breakfast table. The
moment I go in with bread, butter and now milk I become seen at
breakfast." Imagining biscuits compete only with other biscuits is a
fallacy. There are several other options from healthy ones like fruits to
not so healthy ones like deep friend traditional Indian snacks. Other
categories on the other hand are a lot more airtight. For instance,
according to Bali, "Someone who is going to have curd rice for lunch
will definitely have curds. The choice then is whether it is homemade or if
they opt for our brand or the competition."
When it comes to milk, Britannia again ties it in
with health, selling slim or zero fat milk in terapaks. Its flavoured milk
range with variants like badam, chocolate and the soon to be launched chaas
in Mumbai, ensure it gets into lunchboxes too. Says Bali, "There is a
conventional way of thinking about brands which is 'how much do I
advertise?' or 'what do I do at the point of sales?' Another way to think
is how often am I relevant to the consumer right through the day? One of
the things that's worked for us is to extend and expand Britannia in a
consumer's life." It's been pushing the edge on differentiation in
cheese not just via flavoured spreads and cheese cubes but more recently
with gourmet variants imported from Austria.
Many of these products being a lot more perishable
than Britannia's mainstay of biscuits has caused it to relook at
distribution. Curd has a 15 day shelf life but that's only if stored in the
right conditions. And when it comes to bread, Bali says, "In a city
like Mumbai, if it's not available between 6:30 and 7:00 in the morning,
we've effectively lost our sales for the day since they want fresh bread.
The product, form and character determine the go-to-market strategy."
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