@having Maggi

A couple of days back, I happened to see the TVC made as part of Maggi’s 25 years in India celebrations, and the association with the brand was so strong that I had to check it out and write a post on it.

Right from school, when I used to exchange part of my lunch gladly for a classmate’s Maggi, until a little more than a year back, when Sunfeast Pasta replaced it, Maggi noodles used to rule the category. And even now, it makes its presence felt in the household, in the form of sauces and soups.

The TVC has been well made and features the Maggi moments in the lives of different consumers – “camping wali maggi”, “first impression maggi”, “hostel ki maggi” etc, and even a “mumbai flood maggi”. I hunted for the TVC on YouTube, couldn’t find it, but thankfully remembered the site url from the ad. So you can take a look at it here – meandmeri.in – unfortunately no permalink, so click on the watch, and then ‘Currently on air’.

From a consumer’s perspective, Maggi has built its entire equity based on a great product (they actually lost market share when they tried to change the product taste) . From a marketer’s perspective, the positioning has been awesome, they’ve created some memorable campaigns (most of us would still remember the Maggi jingle), and all of this has led to much emotional connect.  There are a million Maggi stories waiting to be told. So, to me, the web provided some great opportunity for the brand to connect with its consumers.

I wanted to start with this urban legend(?) of a research which I have heard in B school, about how market research had predicted that Maggi would bomb as a product in India. It was often cited as THE example to ridicule the MR loyalists. I couldn’t find it online, but what I did find were some very cool notes. For those interested in Nestle’s brand strategy, positioning etc, here are a few links – Growth Strategy, an interview with the Nestle India MD (2007), and a case analysis.

So, what are they doing online? I checked out the Nestle India corporate site and couldn’t see any mention there on the campaign or the microsite. Thankfully I remembered the microsite url, though I wonder why Maggi does not figure in it. The microsite is built on the concept of consumers sharing their Maggi stories, pictures, videos, and even recipes. The interface for that is decent. But what I liked best was the Maggi time machine, which shows ads from years back!! I wonder what prevented them from enabling comments on them!! So, in essence, except for a few ‘stories’, I couldn’t find a lot of conversations there.

Later in the day, I was on Twitter, and lo and behold – Maggi conversations.

(click to enlarge)

I also got to know from @additiyom that there was a Facebook fan page too. While I did get a couple of Maggi pages with 5 figure fan followings, they were the international versions, and I thought this one (found on page 3 of search) with close to 300 fans was the desi version. There are many Maggi groups on Orkut, one with almost 40000 members, and 4 others with more than 5000 members. In the first group, there are about 160 responses for ‘which maggi flavor do you like most?’

It made me think once again, of how brands make a website and  forget about the internet strategy. I’d have loved to see a more well thought out web campaign – with the microsite also serving as an aggregator of content from places where the conversation is happening, for starters. By all means use mass media and promote the site, but if the idea is about getting in touch with consumers, it definitely helps to seed and maintain conversations over at the usual suspects – Facebook, Orkut, YouTube and even Twitter. The audience is already there.

until next time, 2 minutes definitely makes sense in real time 😉

PS: Remember the old Maggi joke when Sourav Ganguly was out of form? 🙂