Soft drinks, energy drinks and now detergents, it seems that consumers are due to witness some great creative dirty linen washing in public. We all have witnessed Coke-Pepsi band war and have much enjoyed Pepsi’s slogan “Nothing official about it!!” and to be honest it was a catchy line, and it was quite useful as well especially when you used it on dates, Obviously you had to be a bit creative in it’s usage. ;) Anyway, using catchy lines on dates is not the theme of this article, theme is brand wars.
Then we witnessed war between Horlicks and Complan, this war was initiated by Horlicks but has been taken up seriously by Complan. Complan struck back very aggressively and has never relented since then. Poor Horlicks, shouldn’t have poked the sleeping liger!!
This time we have HUL’s Rin & P&G’s Tide horn locked together in the brand war. However, this time story is not that simple, it so happens that HUL has been loosing its market share over the past few years and since Rin and Tide have been pitching for same market of whiteness in clothes competition has been very intense. So, In January’10 P&G launched ‘Tide Naturals’ at a much lower price as compared to the original Tide or RIN which started eating away into Rin’s market. Apparently by natural P&G meant that they had added some scents (Lime & ….) to Tide. Now, we as consumers sometimes are not very vigilant in terms of brands and just take them on the face value and probably that’s what happened with Tide as well. People didn’t notice that the lower priced product was Tide Naturals and not the original tide, although the packaging for both the Tide’s is different as well. Original one is in Orange and later one is in Greenish yellow. Its also possible that people just assumed that Tide Naturals would provide the same kind of whiteness after washing as Tide. Whatever the thought process of the consumer but that’s how P&G played its card for eating into Rin’s market. Now, I wonder isn’t that fooling the consumer? I would leave this question open.
Now, we move on to HUL and its current raging advertisement on TV channels(Watch @: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2M5rBXtK9iA ), In this advert RIN goes in for a direct comparison with Tide Naturals(Look at the advert carefully) and not original Tide. HUL doesn’t go for any mud slinging and sticks to promoting only its product RIN and they have put all the disclaimers in place on the advert. However, lets face it Tide is getting an indirect promotion form it. Let’s just say bad publicity is a kind of publicity as well and with Indian consumer you never know HUL might find that their plan has back fired.
So, in this advert RIN guys just state that RIN provides better whiteness that Tide. You can say that it was a move from RIN to educate consumers that Tide and Tide Naturals are different from each other and P&G has probably been fooling consumers by selling them Tide Naturals on the brand wave of Tide. However, point to note is that how many consumers are aware of the fact that Tide and Tide Naturals are different products launched by P&G to capture different income segments? If the intent was to bring awareness to consumer and majority of consumers are not aware of the difference between the two P&G Tide products, then the Ad could be a complete failure, but hold your horses before jumping to any conclusion.
Its possible that this advert was aimed that directly at Tide and Tide Naturals was used as a bate. Since in all probability Tide Naturals is an inferior product and Rin in comparison to RIN and HUL guys got this verified through an independent lab and used it to hit Tide brand where it hurt the most.
Whatever the intent of the HUL guys, the crux is HUL has played the game very wisely, they timed the advert over the long weekend so that P&G could not obtain the stay on advert as all the law enforcement agency would not be functional and in this long weekend damage to Tide has been done and by the looks of it damage could be very costly to P&G, unless they come back with a solid comeback on this advert, which could be very difficult as HUL has not slandered Tide but have just gone for an relative benchmarking with the help of an independent laboratory.
Its should be interesting to see what happens next, I would just urge Indian consumer to be a bit more alert and cautious. :)
Happy washing !!
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