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'.