Prestige: From pressure cooker to kitchen-ware

For as long as one can remember, the brand Prestige has been synonymous with pressure cookers. And, according to executives at TTK Prestige, changing this perception was the biggest challenge for the brand. Not to mention, the brand existed only in South India. Thus emerged the need to establish Prestige as a national brand meant for the contemporary smart and urban woman.

As Chandru Kalro, executive vice-president, marketing, TTK Prestige, puts it, “It has been four years, since Prestige, the pressure cooker brand extended its product range to kitchen appliances. However, consumers still largely perceived Prestige to be a pressure cooker brand. In fact, consumers were totally ignorant about Prestige’s product range. The biggest challenge for us was to position Prestige as a kitchenware brand.”

In order to combat this situation, TTK Prestige recently launched a series of five commercials, each highlighting a different feature and product. These include the ‘Sadhu’ commercial, which propagated the free lifetime after-sales service on Prestige Mixer-grinder. The second ‘Mooh-Bandh; Mooh-Khol’ commercial highlights the two-in-one property of the non-stick appliance, which can be used both as a ‘Kadhai’ and a pressure cooker.

The third ‘Duplex gas-stove’ commercial shows the interaction between a housewife and her maid-servant, which brings out the feature of a four-burner stove, in a unique two storey format.

Says Kalro, “The insight behind this commercial was that a housewife can’t handle four burners at the same time. So, through the housewife-maid interactions, we brought out the convenient and easy cooking aspect of this product.”

The ‘Sab Kuch Jach Raha Hai’ commercial, on the other hand, shows a husband and wife purchasing a pressure cooker at a Prestige outlet. On seeing the range of colourful and vibrant pressure cookers, the wife innocently asks the husband which ones did he like. The husband, who is talking on the cell-phone, answers absent-mindedly, “Sab Jach Raha Hai” (“I like them all”). The clever wife takes advantage of this and purchases a whole range of cookers. When her husband protests, she says smartly that it was he who said that he liked them all.

Talking about this ad, Kalro says, “The aim here is to get people to buy our range of attractive and colourful non-stick pressure cookers, even if they already have pressure cookers at home. The point is to make it connect with them as an attractive product that matches their lifestyle.”

The last commercial in the campaign shows the wife tapping a range of Prestige non-stick cookware with two metal spatulas, creating a kind of percussion music. Towards the end of the ad, the message is brought out through a voice over, that Prestige non-stick cookware can now be used with metal spatulas also, without the hassle of using wooden ones, as is a common practice.

All five commercials have the same tagline, ‘Are you ready for a smarter kitchen?’

Says Kalro, “Each commercial brings out the uniqueness of every product. For instance the ‘Metal Spatula’ commercial tells women that they don’t need to change their cooking habits. They can continue using metal spatulas instead of a wooden one for non-stick cookware.”

Interestingly, each of the commercials is a 15-seconder. And 15 seconds can be too short a time to register with the consumers.

Jagdish Acharya, executive creative director, Mudra, Bangalore, clarifies, “Prestige has launched five new products across the country. So we could not roll out long commercials for each one, due to budgetary constraints. Yes, it was a challenge for us to convey everything in 15 seconds, but I’m sure that the central thought of ‘smart women’ registers easily with the consumers.”

He adds, “The common insight for all these ads was that kitchenware often reminds a woman of drudgeries. So, the obvious way of communicating would have been through the typical emotional route. But, we wanted to convey that the intelligent woman of today doesn’t need to be told what the product can do for her. She knows it.”

Talking about the lifestyle connect with urban Indian women, Acharya elaborates, “The housewife in the commercials has been portrayed as a smart, mature woman, whose passion for her kitchenware is same as that of personal item, such as a sari or jewellery.”

As far as the results of the campaign so far are concerned, this is what Kalro of TTK Prestige has to say: “We had projected a growth of 20 per cent in terms of sales volume by end of 2005. And, now our expectations have gone up as the brand has already registered an increase of 35 per cent in terms of sales.”

© 2005 agencyfaqs!