Everybody’s Cup of Tea!

A cup of tea is a cup of tea, right? Wrong! In fact, nothing can be further from the truth. Teas, and hence tea drinkers, aren’t heterogeneous. It takes all kinds of varieties and brews to satisfy any sample population. Especially if you extrapolate that sample to a country as diverse as India.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

Almost down to the individual, Indians love their tea – tea drinking is the closest thing to a national pastime. But tastes and biases differ sharply. Resulting in tea makers having to grapple with that particular headache. One brand or variety cannot satisfy everybody. The North and East swear by leaf tea; consumers in the South historically enjoy tea dust. And even within these broad preferences exist sub-preferences that range from strength and flavour to colour and grain size.

The solution then is to create several sub brands – around the mid-eighties, that was the case with every tea brand. Typically each company floated at least five varieties in the market, catering to various regions. For national brands it opened up needless multiple fronts – fighting a mélange of local competitors firmly entrenched in their respective regions.

Shaken into Action

It was against this backdrop that Lipton launched a new brand – one that would attempt to defy conventional wisdom of one tea does not satisfy all. Tata Tea had just entered and shaken up the traditional tea market by introducing tea in polypouches. This revolutionised tea drinking in the country, as the cost of packaging had come down to levels where polypouches weren’t all that more expensive than loose tea.

The packaged tea market expanded rapidly and, within just two years of launch, Tata Tea carved out 10% of the market. That was worrying for a category leader like Lipton. It had to make up for the shift in tea drinking habits by entering the packaged tea market itself.

After protracted market testing, Lipton finally launched Taaza. Along every parameter, including price, it was on par with Tata Tea, which had the first-movers advantage. So, Lipton had to try something different. By branding and positioning, freshness was the message – but that alone wasn’t going to cut it.

Dual-Prong Strategy

The company opted to dual-prong its strategy by tweaking the contents to suit regional tastes while keeping the packaging uniform. In doing so it was able to leverage economies of scale and keep costs on level, while gradually establishing itself as a national brand – not something that any tea brand had been able to do in the longest time.

The lengthy market testing had revealed a few insights. Consumers liked the touch-feel-see experience when it came to buying their tea. The Lipton Taaza pack had a small transparent window that at least allowed consumers to see what they were buying. The rest of the pack went high on the freshness quotient – tea garden imagery set within freshness colours, gave it intense visual appeal. All in all, Taaza was a single umbrella brand that came in a variety of blends – five dust and two leaf.

There was also the economical angle to consider – so the brand was launched in a variety of pack sizes. Bulkier packs for urban consumers, economic packs for rural. It even floated the six-cup Re. 1- pack that delivered both economy and convenience.

Bridging the Geographical Divide

Geographical angle too! The brand somewhat bifurcated its packaging and communication by a North-South divide – using Hindi for the North, and English for the South. Ditto the creative concepts – while dance was the central theme of the ad campaign, it used Kathak up North, but chose Bharatnatyam and Carnatic music for its southern audiences.

All the right moves, one would think. Taaza quickly racked up a 10% share in the branded tea market in a few years, while contributing a third of Lipton’s cumulative tea sales. Growing at a pace faster than the overall market, it led the company to consider exporting the brand overseas.

Lipton Taaza was a strategy that worked. It could just as easily have gone all wrong. But as the old adage goes – Faint hearts never win a war. When a new competitor arrived and started nibbling away at its market share, the brand had to do something. In this case, it was the me-too – replicating Tata’s entry into packaged tea. But what made the difference was some astute marketing and a willingness to take a risk. With risk came reward.

Watch this space for more interesting case-studies from the archives of marketing history.