New Delhi Colgate-Palmolive India has relaunched several toothpaste brands in the recent past, reinforcing positive, distinctive and inspiring memories. In an interview, Arvind Chintamani, Vice President of Marketing, talked about the relaunch using influencer and marketing in rural and urban markets. Edited excerpt:
We have seen Colgate re-launching a slew of its flagship brands in the market. What inspired this practice?
Building a brand is like creating a memory structure in people’s minds. You want your memory structure to be positive, specific, and persuasive. While your brand is a set of positive, specific associations and persuasive associations, a product fulfills that as well. For us, re-launches are very important events because ultimately, we are a brand-building organization.
Recently, we relaunched Colgate Strong Teeth, which is our flagship toothpaste. It is India’s No. 1 toothpaste and one of the most widely used and most distributed products in the country. It is bought or used by over 600 million people annually. What we had to do to start again is to highlight the fact that tooth strength is an important part of your digestive process. It may sound straightforward, but I don’t think many people realize that the strength of teeth can make a difference in the quality of chewing and therefore the quality of nutrition. So, for the re-launch, we got Shahid Kapoor, and progressive men/fathers taking the message across the country. We also relaunched Colgate Vedashakti, a portfolio of toothpaste, mouth spray and oil pulling. If you look at that portfolio – the message is very simple, it’s talking about your overall health, not just your mouth. The second thing that we have been doing continuously for the last four to five years is to tell stories of optimism and do it in Hindi and in different languages under the banner of Smile Aur Shubh Jaao. It is Colgate master brand which is living up to its philosophy. We have recently put together a new story of Kiran Kanojia who is India’s first female blade runner.
Has the pandemic moved more advertising dollars to digital?
For us, to be selected as a brand, is to be available both mentally and physically. If our consumers are mentally spending more time consuming content digitally, and physically more time transacting digitally – we need to spend more time and attention digitally . We have opened a direct-to-consumer platform – cpbrush.co.in – where we are exclusively selling Power Toothbrushes and we are seeing a phenomenal response to it. So, we are doing a lot of things from content as well as transactional point of view i.e. on e-commerce platform. India is a very interesting country – while digital events have increased, television viewership has also increased in this period. The time they spend may have changed, but the number of people watching traditional media has actually grown. Guided by the philosophy of integrated brand experiences across media, touch points and messages. This doesn’t mean repeating what you put on e-commerce, what you put on television, etc., but fashion your communication for the medium to create a smooth, coherent message across touchpoints that help structure your memory. does.
Does television account for the largest share of media spending?
We don’t give out our numbers, but in terms of reach frequency in the country at the moment, TV is the single most singular reach medium for certain types of communication. So, we are using both TV and digital media… Mainly it is mobile in India, for different types of messaging. Let me give you the example of rural, it is very interesting to see how rural India has developed. People confuse the rural Indian consumer as a fundamentally different creation, but people in rural India are increasingly consuming the same content and increasingly accessing the same media. The difference, if any, remains around access. We are increasingly using technology to conduct consumer research in rural India, as we now have tools available to talk to people in different parts of the country at a day’s notice.
More importantly, we are treating rural India and urban India as aspirational… Also, now because of digital reach, we are able to have a more targeted reach.
You recently ran a campaign featuring influencers; Are influencers becoming the key to your marketing ecosystem?
Two and a half months ago, we aired the Visible White O2 campaign; And we did it with Toshada Uma, Dolly Singh and Prarthana Jagan. Not only from the branding point of view, but from the business point of view, it is doing really well. This has reinforced our belief in the fact that if influencers are used appropriately and authentically to value those who see them we can derive tremendous value from them.
Society has changed, culture has changed and brands have changed according to culture. For us, influencer marketing is a way to bring value to the lives of people, whether they are urban or rural, less important to us, but what their aspirations are.
Will we see more premium launches from Colgate?
Nine out of 10 Indian households buy us every year. We need to talk to every section of the country. We strongly believe that everyone deserves a future they can smile about; These are words that we have thought very carefully about
, So, for Colgate, in our DNA, the democratic nature of what we do is extraordinarily important. For us, it’s not just premium; Premium is the end result of what we offer.