[Marketing Mantra] Why India Says "NO" for Diet Food Concept?

[Logu]

It’s yet another usual weekend for me, here in Hyderabad, spending most of my time at home doing NOTHING and recollecting some of the recent marketing news that I came across in the recent past. On that queue I can recollect an interesting article posted in ET which claims that brands which have added diet products in their portfolio have miserably failed to make it successful in India, post launch. 

Highlighting couple of brands like Parle’s “Monaco Smart Chips”, Pepsi Max a 'more fizz, no sugar' cola with their failure stories, the article claims that the diet foods doesn't attracted the Indian audience and sharing only a very least chunk in the respective core categories.  While addressing on this case, we should also look in to the real fact that Indian consumers are showing high attention on their health and hygiene and we have all reports in place to prove this.

The understanding is very simple, brands should learn that we Indian masses have already started worrying for our healthy life but we have our own interests to unleash, when it comes to choice of consuming impulse food categories including, soft drinks, snacks, juice based drinks (JBDs), ice creams, chocolates, biscuits and other food categories that we consume occasionally or very occasionally and not being a part of our daily meal chart.

Though the brands claim that they never compromise on the taste when they rollout diet foods, the USP as “DIET food” is yet to be an eye catchy element for the Indian crowd. Having said this, the brands that cleverly understood the market mentality have started introducing Diet/healthy food categories that straightaway replaces our traditional/high calorie Indian foods. Quaker launched Oats in the cereal category has never cried for any loss in the Indian market till now, Kellogg’s, found it very difficult to penetrate its corn flakes category as a breakfast substitute when launched, now enjoys the market response with 70% market share in the 400 crore worth ready-to-eat breakfast cereal market in India (Source: Business Standard). 

The mantra behind the success is, these brands never said that their products are only for obese or for people with extra weight, rather they cleverly positioned it for all the individuals who are health conscious and left it at a generic cloud level.  

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Posted By Logu to Marketing Mantra at 7/23/2011 11:36:00 PM