Sweetening The Consumer Connect

Providing the right foundation to the brands Snickers, Doublemint and M&M, Yogesh Tewari, Director Marketing and Customer Marketing, Mars Wrigley Confectionery India talks about how he is steering these brands in the Indian confectionery market.

- Dipali Banka

Q] Snickers’ first campaign was quite bold and set the brand rolling in India. Since then you have had quite a few extensions of the positioning ‘hunger acche accho ko badal deta hai’. Can you take us through Snickers’ brand journey from its launch to where it stands today?

Snickers is a global brand and we have the same positioning across all markets. The campaign is stretchable because it’s based on a universal insight that has multiple executions. Most markets have made it relevant to local context and India is no different. We launched the campaign with Rekha and received great acceptance from consumers. It was a bold and creative risk but it went off very well. People started understanding the concept of ‘You are not you when you are hungry’. We have come quite far in terms of not just the campaign, but the entire environment around it.

If you look at the product journey, we customized Snickers specifically for the Indian market, making it vegetarian and offering it at a competitive price point. We launched a Rs. 10 product which gave us a huge opportunity to reach our consumers in traditional trade. We’ve also made changes in the recipe, making it a little robust. And all this has been well complemented by our brand campaign.

Post that campaign, we did another one with Sonam Kapoor which was an extension of the same creative idea, but with different execution. And through the campaign with Dhoni, we have taken it a notch higher, gaining us a wider audience in terms of cricketers who are relevant across different states, as compared to Hindi and Bollywoodrelevant geographies. Secondly, M S Dhoni is a legend who is revered, with a character that is very well established. So on the creative side, the campaign could leverage his strength, character and acceptance across different age groups and demographics, and the results have been fantastic for us.