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| PepsiCo India: Upping the optimism quotient |
| Sayantani Kar & Sarmistha Neogy / Mumbai Jan 30, 2012, 00:00 IST |
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The optimistic attitude of the youth towards all problems in life is beautifully captured in 7Up’s new campaign. The campaign is part of the brand’s repositioning exercise that includes a new tagline ‘Dil bole I feel up’, a brand new logo and packaging. The new logo retains the same colour scheme as the earlier one; however, the font is different, and aims to be more youthful, progressive and confident, says PepsiCo India.
The brand’s television ad features brand ambassador Sharman Joshi in a dance-off with a penguin. Shot in Australia, the film has been choreographed by Simon Lind of Happy Feet 2 fame. Ram Sampath has composed the anthem. For now, the rebranding is for the Indian market but could be carried to Argentina and Russia at a later stage.
“With the new campaign, the brand is undergoing a change — from a slightly negative accent earlier we are focusing on optimism as dictated by research. Despite all that ails our country now, we are not down and out. There are many reasons why we are still gung-ho about our future, instead of moping around,” says Ruchira Jaitly, category marketing director, flavoured carbonated drinks, PepsiCo. “Youngsters today feel that they can be agents of their own positive change.” Irrespective of age, the optimism or as the brand puts it, ‘UPtimism’, also stems from the awareness that everything can be improved upon.
“The lemon factor in 7Up is always associated with mood upliftment,” says Josy Paul, head creative director, BBDO, the agency that conceptualised the campaign. “This remains the continuity factor in all our campaigns while the context keeps changing. The challenge for us this time was how to capture and bottle the optimistic mood of young India.”
To this end, a new website www.ifeelup.in is supported by initiatives on social networking platforms such as Facebook (www.facebook.com/7UPIndia) and Twitter. To test if the whole idea will work, the company launched a viral campaign first. On Twitter 7Up hosted the World’s Largest Virtual Conference, the #IFeelUp Tweetathon. The Tweetathon celebrated everything positive about India and panelists discussed the most relevant topics of the day. “The tweets were put up without any brand reference, but got a tremendous response and thus it made us sure we are on the right track,” asserts Paul.
Chennai is the host of the soft launch, given the brand’s strong connect with Tamil Nadu. “Going forward, 7UP’s dancing man Sherif, winner of the dance reality show on Vijay TV, Ungalil Yaar Adutha Prabhudeva, will travel to 11 cities for a month with a giant-size 7Up bottle, collecting reasons as to why people feel optimistic about India. Of course, it will also be a rich minefield for us to understand the reasons ourselves for further campaigns,” asserts Jaitly.
Some of the earlier campaigns of 7Up include ‘Bheja fry, toh 7UP try’ and last year’s ‘Gussa hatao and chill machao’. “We are also strengthening the Nimbooz brand and the campaign will encompass both. Nimbooz was always endorsed by 7UP and the new communication will be common for both,” says Jaitly.
According to Euromonitor International, the retail carbonated drinks market in India was worth Rs 63.4 billion in value terms in 2011 and 1.8 billion litres in volume. Pepsi topped the market share list with a 15.6 per cent share, followed by Thums Up (15.6 per cent), Sprite (15.3 per cent) and Coca-Cola (8.9 per cent). 7Up was placed in the sixth position with a market share of 5.5 per cent.
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