Sugar Free Gold: A Study in Advertising Effectiveness

The Sugar Free Gold campaign, 'First Step to Fitness', is a lesson in advertising effectiveness.

The ad (view ad here) shows a slim and sultry Bipasha walking us through a malaise that most individuals suffer from.. the desire to stay fit but the absence of action. We do plenty of thinking about staying fit, but don't end up acting on our thoughts. She goes on to promote Sugar Free Gold, the 'low-calorie sugar substitute', as a starting point to getting fit.

The ad stands out because it illustrates this problem of failure to launch cleverly and clearly. Through familiar scenes like an unused treadmill and the 'unavoidable' partaking of sweets, the spot illustrates the problem in a way that makes you nod sheepishly and say to yourself , 'Yeah, that's me..'. It gets your attention, because it’s talking about you in real life faced with realistic situations that get your fitness goat. No preposterous or over the top advertising here.

It also shows that the planners have done their job. They've studied the audience's behavior in this area and understood how the mind works - most people are bullish on staying fit, but most often its the start, the launch, that's daunting. People are wary about the fitness regime, the grind, and they create excuses to skip it or delay it or simply not begin an exercise routine. The ad has a solution...a simple one, a familiar one that gives that friendly little mental push needed to begin the journey.

'The First Step to Fitness.'

It need not be a big deal, Bipasha says. Start small. Little everyday habits can help you meet your goal. Don't take the elevator, take the stairs instead. It's that simple. And in place of sugar, take Sugar-Free Gold.

Piece of cake, isn't it? That's advertising!

The marketing message has cleverly juxtaposed the product with a social message. By placing the product as the secondary solution that simply accompanies the first, the ad takes the spotlight away from the product. It tries to indicate that the real concern is our well-being instead. By providing a solution that we know is do-able, is good for us, the ad creates trust, and then it very matter-of-factly, almost casually, slips the product before our eyes ("Lift ke jagah stairs lijiye, aur cheeni ki jagah, Sugar-Free Gold"); meaning, 'in place of the elevator, take the stairs, and in place of sugar, take Sugar Free Gold'.
They've refrained from directly selling the product. They've made it look less like advertising and more like community health advice. They know, we're more likely to digest the second pill.

The marketers have tried to kickstart a revolution that requires their product. Positioning Sugar-Free Gold as the first (and most convenient, mind you!) step to fitness is sure to have consumers switching to it to prove to themselves that they're officially on a fitness regime! It is bound to be effective.

Dabur Honey - The Sugar Replacement

Dabur Honey, by far the largest player in the Indian branded honey market with over 75% market share, has reinforced the extension of its positioning from simply a 'honey brand' to a 'daily sweetener' : a healthier, more beneficial alternative to sugar. The new ad campaign (view here) features Indian actress Shilpa Shetty promoting honey as being healthier than sugar, with three clear benefits: making you fit, active, and glowing; that is, younger.

It is exciting to see a widely-used consumer product expanding its positioning to include more functional uses, with a view to boosting consumption. The idea of honey as a sugar alternative isn't new, and has only recently been actively pursued by a honey brand. The timing for Dabur couldn't be better. In an age when fitness, health-food and calorie-counting are buzzwords, especially amongst urbanites, people are constantly looking for ways to rationalize their non-nutritious food intake, while not overly compromising on taste. Sugar is widely viewed as an unhealthy additive, yet necessary for taste, hence it ends up being part of every diet. Positioning honey as its replacement is a sure-shot way to catch the fancy of this segment. From the marketer's perspective, it presents a huge captive market that is already consuming sweetener in the form of sugar, so there is no question of creating a need. And honey is anyway widely consumed for its health benefits, in fact, most urban households invariably stock a bottle of honey as a wellness product. Dabur's attempt is a logical extension of the 'sweet' characteristic of honey to the sweetener category.

From the consumer's perspective, it is a welcome and sought-after solution to the burning problem of reducing sugar intake while maintaining taste. And if it comes with additional benefits like making you look younger, as Shilpa coos in the ad, that's even better. In fact, there is every reason for Shilpa's fitness mantra to turn into a mass, new-age trend - a virally spreading lifestyle choice.

However, as always, the devil is in the details. One must note that the brand / ad has consciously stayed away from mentioning anything related to calories. That's because honey is not a reduced-calorie replacement for sugar, as opposed to artificial sweeteners like Sugar-Free. In fact, honey is composed of 82% sugars! But,being rich and naturally-occurring, and enjoying ancestral branding as a life-enhancing nectar, these facts are largely ignored by Indian consumers. Dabur has shrewdly glossed over this little detail with the perceived transformational benefits of the product.

Still, it shouldn't stand in the way of the brand gate-crashing its way into the sugar cabinet. With a 75% market share already, things can only get sweeter for the brand.

Emirates : Destination First

The Emirates ad campaign that celebrated the airline's various destinations had a different and interesting strategy.

When airlines advertise, they try to impress a differentiating factor in their quality of service or exclusivity of product offering. In this industry, the product is the aircraft itself, plus everything in and around it. So you will see ads showing off brand new aircraft, spacious seats and upgraded in-flight entertainment systems, or service ads highlighting on-time service, a wide connectivity network and hot food.

This is also why airlines tend to go in for brand and livery makeovers so often. It is a constant attempt to paint a picture of health and novelty in the consumers’ minds. Wouldn’t you prefer flying in a gleaming, newly-painted aircraft that has “fresh-off-the- assembly-line” written all over it, as compared to one with dull and drab exteriors that have looked the same since ages? Never mind that the decked-up aircraft is more than 20 years old!

And for all its shortcomings, this approach may be right, because when ticket prices are nearly the same, all that distinguishes one airline from another in the mind of the traveler are these superficial benefits or qualities.

The Emirates campaign brought a new dimension to the airline-traveler equation: the destination of travel. It is a strategy that results, I think, from a deep and true understanding of the traveler’s mindset.

When you think about booking a ticket, what is the first, root thought in your mind? Where do you begin the process of planning a trip from?

Your destination.

Every travel plan starts with a destination in mind. The destination is the reason for flying in the first place, isn’t it? It is after the destination is clear that you get down to the lesser details like flight booking, airline, price, stopovers, departure/arrival timing, seats, service etc. It is here, in this segment of the travel planning process that airlines vie against each for space in the consumer’s mind. And breaking this clutter becomes difficult.

Emirates, brilliantly, tried to influence the consumer at one step earlier in the decision making process. Their ads promoted Emirates’ destinations as the reason to fly, not the airline itself. With rich, striking portrayals of popular and exotic travel places like Rome, Barcelona, Las Vegas and New York, the ads created exciting, aspirational images of those destinations in the mind, giving birth to a want. When the time for actual travel to that destination arrived (when the want turned into a need), the rich, visual memory of that destination (as created by the ad) would instantly be linked to the impending journey, creating gratification that the want is about to be fulfilled. And consequently, with the image of the destination in mind, travel to that destination would immediately be linked to Emirates.

Emirates created a want that it enticingly offered to fulfill, and when the want became a need, the consumer automatically associated Emirates as the preferred vehicle to fulfill that need.

Insightful, fresh, and clutter-breaking.

Knorr Soupy Noodles - a tasty treat, but difficult to eat

HUL's Knorr has been a major player in the packaged soup category. With no presence in the noodles category, it has recently introduced a product that makes both categories meet half-way: soupy noodles.

Both instant noodles (read Maggi) and soups have been marketed as a pre-dinner, evening time snack for families. Pushed as a healthy alternative to junk food during the evening hours when kids, especially, feel hungry and tend to grab whatever they can lay their hands on to satiate cravings. Soupy Noodles maintains this target group and rightly so, because the combination of soup and noodles brings a sense of excitement, almost playfulness, to the food. It sends out a clear message to kids and moms both - why choose one, when you can get both together.

But whether one really does get both together is a matter of contention, as this author uncovered while sampling the product personally. After trying it, there remained one question unanswered - How does one consume it?

There were two aspects -  one with the contents in the bowl, the other with the method of consuming them.

The soup is no doubt delicious, but the noodles themselves are bland. If you use a fork to twist up some noodles, the soup is left behind, and you get a mouthful of ordinary-tasting noodles that aren't as delicious as the original, instant variety. On the other hand, if you've tried using a spoon to eat noodles before, you know it isn't the easiest thing to do - they simply slip off. So if you attack your soupy noodles with a spoon, all you get is a spoonful of soup, and you miss out on the noodles.

It may sound like a trifle, almost comical. But it is a grave situation for the consumer, for this IS what he/she will experience. The reality is that whether you use a spoon, fork or try alternating between the two as this author did, more often that not you do not get to savor the goodness of both ingredients at once.

The product may initially create excitement by riding on the novelty wave, but as repeat consumers will find, you simply don't get the mazaa of noodles and soup together. When it comes down to the actual act of consumption, the brand finds it difficult to deliver on its promise. Its simply an issue of cutlery.

Cinderella Marketing

"Get 12-hour protection from germs."

"The first 24-hour deodorant."

"Keep lips soft and shiny from 9 to 5."

Many products sound like they come with a countdown timer. Twelve hours, and you're out of luck! Like the fairytale's midnight deadline, your products are hourglassed, with the sand slowly slipping away until its time for a re-use.

I call it Cinderella Marketing - giving products a threshold of effectiveness. As limiting as it may sound for the product, it may actually be a well-thought marketing strategy playing on behavioral tendencies : make to the consumer a concrete promise of working for a guaranteed period of time - those few hours in which he/she can rest assured that nothing can go wrong. Its the assurance that for those few hours, he won't suffer from body odor, or that the gleam of her lip gloss will still remain as attractive. But also getting ingrained at the back of his/her mind is the warning that the clock is ticking - there's a stipulated time, only a few hours left before the effect wears off, the promise is broken, the magic disappears, and things go back to normal.


That's where the re-consumption aspect comes in - as a consumer, you've been surreptitiously convinced that one use of your product is good for just X hours, so you'll automatically reach for a re-use after that. Makes marketing sense - if the need for a re-consumption can be created after a fixed number of hours, why make it ambiguous and subjective by attaching indefinite ('long-lasting') time periods to it?

For the seller, its the tangible, numerical value that helps sell more more than the term 'long-lasting'.