Playing favourites this festival season

Amazon

With real heavyweight competition in the crowded e-commerce space, Amazon performed surprisingly well in the communication space. The strategy to go completely desi was a gem.

Amazon not just created good advertising, it felt the pulse of the Indian consumer, decided it was looking for a load of choice and ran campaigns on a theme that offered endless choices, well before the festive season driving traffic to their site.

Their back-end had already been bolstered not just in terms of logistics, but also in terms of motivation and this probably not just positioned them as a caring organisation internally, but helped in timely deliveries as well.

Set against doughty heavies such as Flipkart and Snap Deal, Amazon has hit the ground running. Aur Dikhao, Aur Dikhao!

Ramesh Narayan , Communications consultant

Ola

My nomination goes out to the taxi cab aggregator, Ola. Ola brought into India a model that was well tested by Über globally. Ola customised its offering to India. And it aggregated a community of drivers seamlessly.

This three-letter brand is today on everyone’s lips. Ola had a blast. It took the discount war into the war rooms of every competitor around. Ola had a blast for sure. For how long, we don't know. Nevertheless, a blast is a blast.

HARISH BIJOOR, Brand expert & founder, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.

Patanjali

The FMCG industry is known for big-budget marketing campaigns, well-entrenched distribution networks and so on. But Patanjali Ayurved, the brand which is associated with Yoga guru Baba Ramdev, is one player which has strayed away from all marketing ingredients that one believed were key to succeed in the FMCG space in India.

Rivals call it a disruptive force. In this financial year, the eight-year-old Patanjali Ayurved is believed to have overtaken established FMCG companies such as Emami and Jyothy Laboratories in sales turnover.

Despite being available primarily through its 15,000-odd exclusive outlets, Patanjali has managed to capture consumer imagination in products ranging from its best-seller toothpaste to biscuits and ghee. With the turnover crossing Rs 2,000 crore the brand is soon extending its reach to categories like instant noodles.

But it’s the unusual extensions in categories ranging from muesli and oats to instant noodles is where analysts fear that the brand may be stretching itself too far.

Maybe there is a pose for that in the Yoga texts!

Maggi

The brand that dominated the news in 2015 was undoubtedly Maggi instant noodles. Nestle, the owner of the brand, which has been criticised for having remained silent for too long when the Maggi crisis blew up, could take heart from the fact that consumer pull stood by them even when the chips, or noodles, were down.

Though most of the attention the brand received was for the wrong reasons, there was a silver lining in the form of the legions of supporters who still swore by the Maggi brand on social media platforms.

Despite its absence from the retail shelves for a better part of this year, retailers in Mumbai say there are scores of enquiries every day on, when will the brand return, ever since news broke that Maggi will make a comeback after the courts and the test reports gave it a thumbs-up.

On its part the company did come out with a much spoken about campaign #WeMissYouToo which spoke about situations that youngsters had to deal with due to the absence of their favourite snack – wondering what to do with tomatoes and carrots that would have been otherwise added to the instant noodles, or sourcing menu cards that would have otherwise become paper rockets. With Maggi’s imminent return, perhaps it’s time to fire up those paper rockets.

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