Coca cola a preferred foreign brand in India, but often criticised to be a pesticide, desecration of American culture, and a good remedy to be used to clean the toilet. The good news for Coke is that the upper class segments of India especially in the North India do always prefer Coke as a brand of their life-style that purely imitates the westerners`. However, the bad news is that there are loads of endeavours from the local players and from the religious dominators to kill this brand in India.
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh a popular Hindu Nationalist group made an endeavour to produce a soft-drink from cow`s urine in the year 2010. Om Pragash the president of the group said to the times of India that ``Don`t worry, the drink will not smell like urine and will be tasty too``. Moreover, it was said that the drink would be added with some medicinal benefits to the consumers such it can be used as a good remedy to reduce diabetics and cancer. When looking at where the drink was intended to be positioned would be just against Coke. In a shallow view, it may seem that this drink has nothing to beat against Coke and it is sure that this has nothing to do against Coke in the world market. However, in the context of India, cow urine is viewed as sacred and this reasoning adds much religious plus emotional value to the drink, and is a value based positioning against Coco-cola. Nevertheless, this drink has not been launched for any reason and may be in the coming years.
Another local competitor for Coca-cola is Kela-kela a ready to serve banana based soft-drink, which claims to be having high nutritious components, smells good, and tastes extremely good. In both cases of cow-urine and Kela-kela, they can be seen as good value based positioning against Coke. However, they cannot make severe impacts in the Coke`s market share in the Indian market and the reasoning denotes the wrong positioning among wrong segments. The segments who prefer Coke in India are collegians, white collar professionals and upper class rich people. For them, brand name and the American life-style is the matter and would not be bothering much about the concerns such as localization, healthiness and religious value addition. However, other segments stand alone quiet big in the Indian population who prefer facts such as low cost, Indian brand and localization, religious concerns and healthiness, so who knows Coke may have to challenge against the local players in the coming years.
By
Mathangie
You can comment on this blog or may send personal suggestings to my email via nichecrunch@hotmail.com
You can comment on this blog or may send personal suggestings to my email via nichecrunch@hotmail.com
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3 comments:
interesting to know. India always try to have funny movements in their all strategic moves.
But for sure, it doesn`t work. coke is the best in the world...and will be in India..poor fellows, just wasting their time.
Good article with funny info.
Very interesting article...
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