Perhaps the biggest dilemma of the FMCG brand is to cater to the maximum consumers while keeping an adequate balance of niches. It always is a number game and thus its hard to categorize on the basis of income and aspirations or the mere fact that whether you should categorize at all.

Recently Mumbai based company Anchor which is known for electrical equipments has forayed into soap segment and thus trying to bite the share of biggies like Hindustan Unilever and P&G. Anchor’s quite naive in this segment and it clearly shows in their marketing and their whole approach of enticing the consumers.

First of all please tell me who came up with the name “DYNA” because I cant buy the idea that there’s some Indian behind this blunder because every Indian knows what it means in Hindi. OK for all those people short on hindi let me tell you what it means. But before that a little story.

There is this powder brand in India called DermiCool which is quite successful in villages as well as cities. In fact no brand in FMCG industry can be successful in India unless they don’t count villages into their scheme of things, after all 60% Indians live in villages. And companies thus need to be very careful while naming a brand because not all of them know English and thus people will relate the English name in their native language . They targeted the consumers wisely by having a name which rhymes with the season when people are going to use their product. Although I am not sure whether it was deliberate. Garmi is Hindi for the summer season and it clearly rhymes with dermi of Dermi Cool and after that they targeted the consumers with some very straight forward advertising counting the merits of using their brand in summer season (its not just summer season, its summer season in India).

Now coming back to Dyna. There’s a word in Hindi which means b***h and it rhymes 90% with the name of soap we are talking about. Its inevitable that consumers will relate the name and it wont do much good to the brand. I cant imagine an Indian company doing it.

Roping in Katrina Kaif as a brand ambassador who doesn’t know Hindi or for that matter is even more alien to India than Sonia Gandhi is not a wise decision in my view.

 
Recently I came across this piece of news that HUL formerly HLL is now planning to promote its brands through TV shows. What they actually want to do is create programmes built around their brands in an attempt to differentiate. They plan to launch 15 such programmes. This development can be seen as a desperate attempt to keep consumers away from the new entrants in the FMCG space. HUL already spends some serious money on advertising which was Rs 1273 crores in fiscal 2006-2007 and it also makes them the largest indian advertiser. What is strange though is the fact that HUL  is now doing something which is essentially an approach developed and mastered by P&G. The very concept of soap operas was started by P&G back in 1930’s and now HUL seems to dare P&G in their turf. Surprisingly P&G has never used AFP(Advertiser Funded Programming)in India. HUL had started this an year back with Wheel Smart Shreemati which is aired on DD but now they seems to be gearing up for some serious intrusion into the minds of consumers with some more AFP. It would be interesting to see the response of P&G to this.