Coca-Cola creates high visibility for Minute Maid Nimbu Fresh

To make noise around the launch of Nimbu Fresh, Coca-Cola's lemon based variant under the Minute Maid umbrella in markets across the country, the beverage giant has used more than 1,000 sites for outdoor advertisements.

Conceptualised and executed by Coca-Cola in association with its creative agency Leo Burnett and outdoor agency MOMS, the latest outdoor campaign uses multiple formats including billboards, hoardings, bus shelters, foot over bridges, kiosks, gantries, glow signs, railway platforms, mall branding, branding in cabs, buses and trains, and in-station branding at Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC).

Both frequency and innovation are focus areas for the brand's outdoor strategy.

As part of an eye-catching innovation, life size bottles of Minute Maid Nimbu Fresh have been fabricated and placed on roundabouts. The bottles, created with acrylic sheets and HOV fibre, are covered with a special vinyl and lit up with LED lights to get the desired colour effect. Similar innovations have been executed in bus shelters, with smaller cut-outs of the bottle popping out of the top panels.

A senior media planner observes that the target audience is wide in case of a beverage brand and every format is used to talk to people of a particular age group. While branding on Volvo buses and displays on a premium stretch of DMRC is done to capture the youth, branding in malls ensures high visibility amongst people of all age groups from higher middle or middle classes. Similarly, a higher frequency of kiosks and glow signs on a stretch works well for brand recall.

Avinash Pant, director, marketing-stills, Coca-Cola India, feels that outdoor works in favour of a brand such as Nimbu Fresh in two ways. First, it reminds the target audience that a new lemon based drink is available; and second, it catches people's attention when they are out in the sun, and are in desperate need of something to quench their thirst.

"We believe in integrated marketing communication, where every medium delivers our message uniquely. Coca-Cola India has been consistent in the use of outdoor and today, the medium is no more an offshoot of a TV commercial," he adds.

Emulating home-made 'nimbu pani', the drink is made from lemon juice concentrate and comes with the tagline, 'Bilkul ghar jaisa' (just like home). Minute Maid Nimbu Fresh is available in two pack sizes of 400 ml and 1 litre, priced at Rs 15 and Rs 40 respectively.

Interestingly, right from the day of its launch in Tamil Nadu early this year, the company has relied on outdoor and continues to do so as the brand penetrates other key markets across the country. For the brand's pilot campaign in January, the company hired backlit human translites to roam around malls and multiplexes in locations including Coimbatore and Madurai to grab eyeballs and encourage sampling.

Without disclosing spends on outdoor, Pant adds, "In the days to come, we will step up sampling and other on-ground initiatives for the brand."

The history of brand Minute Maid goes as far back as 1945, when it was launched by the Florida Foods Corporation. The Coca-Cola Company subsequently acquired the brand in 1960. Minute Maid is now one of the world's leading juice and juice drink brands.

The size of the largely unorganised 'nimbu pani' market is 1 billion cases, which is double the size of the carbonated soft drink industry in India. According to industry sources, over the past one year, beverage brands have cut down on their outdoor spends drastically.