Why did Dabur’s Real Activ wade into Coca-Cola & Pepsi’s cola war?

With Anytime, Pepsi declared its cola was meant to be drunk anytime and not just at half-time like Coca-Cola’s campaign preached during the recently concluded ICC Men’s Champions Trophy; this single piece of one-upmanship unbottled the famed cola war from cold storage of 29 years; it was last seen in 1996 during the then ICC Cricket World Cup jointly hosted by India, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan. 

Traditionally, cola wars have mostly been advertising fisticuffs between the two famed black cola brands but what nobody expected was seeing Real Activ, a Dabur-owned fruit juice brand wade into this tussle. "If you look back at the history of cola wars back to the seventies and eighties, packaged juices were not readily available unlike today," says Monisha Prasher, marketing head, beverages, Dabur India. 

An ad in the Hindustan Times not only dismissed the two campaigns but positioned Pepsi and Coca-Cola as unhealthy because a single glass of cola has five cubes of added sugar compared to the complete lack of it in a glass of Real Activ. "Keep It REAL, Every Time,” read the copy. 

“Print offers instantaneous reach. You run an ad; it reaches everybody on day one; you achieve your maximum 30% to 40% reach. With television and digital, it is a build-up; slowly and steadily your ad reaches a larger audience."

 Monisha Prasher

“If you see your friend adding five cubes of sugar to their tea, you will call them out. But it was never the case with cola we grew up drinking. So, rather than one-upmanship, we decided to give consumers a perspective about what is it you are drinking,” she adds.  

Introduced in 1997, Real Activ brands itself as a 100% juice brand free of added sugars and preservatives. Its rivals include Minute Maid, Tropicana, Paper Boat, B Natural, and Raw Pressery. 

They all compete against each other in India’s fruit-juice market which IMARC Group, a market research company, says reached around Rs 43,000 crore in size last year and is expected to cross approximately Rs 100,000 crore in size by 2033.

Why print? 

As interesting as the ad was Real’s choice to use the print medium. Coca-Cola’s Half Time was playing online and on television, and Pepsi used print and online to kick off the cola war. 

“Print offers instantaneous reach. You run an ad; it reaches everybody on day one; you achieve your maximum 30% to 40% reach. With television and digital, it is a build-up; slowly and steadily your ad reaches a larger audience,” explains Parasher. 

Why Hindustan Times? “Because in terms of English and Hindi speaking markets of North India and West India, it is very large.” A digital version of the ad is being worked on, we were told. 

Brand banter over everything else? 

Dabur Real Activ was not the only brand that spoke its mind during this cola war. Mother Dairy took to social media and declared milk is meant for a lifetime of consumption, and not at halftime or anytime. 

Also read: Is brand banter online the new hot engagement metric?

These two ads also came at a time when brand banter on social media was at a high. We’re seeing many brands come and dunk on a conversation between two brands and gain some share of publicity.

Prasher says her brand was not indulging in vanity moment marketing. “For us, it was not something we were just doing because it was being talked about by others. We were the first one to launch this category in the country and we continue to lead this category with more than 60% market share.” 

When asked why is it that this summer all kinds of beverages from fruit-based to carbonated have rolled out campaigns and whether Campa Cola’s aggressive pricing was influencing it, she didn’t accept the connection.

Instead, she says, “Beverages have become an all-year phenomenon and not dependent on the summer. It is all about festivities and family time now.”