The last leading cola brand was launched in India about 50 years ago. And other leading cola brands are global giants. So, it was about time The Great Indian Cola made an entry for today’s Indian youth who will make the most of every occasion to live life to the fullest.

The all new Campa comes in a completely transformed avatar. A popular brand from the 1970s and 1980s, is now being launched in cola, lemon and orange flavours.

The rebranding echoes brand’s bold and confident personality, where the use of deep purple is complemented by category-defining red in the Campa ‘swoosh’. This element emulates wiping a chilled can or bottle to reveal the brand. The font used for the logotype mirrors Campa’s stance of a confident, unconventional brand that is set out to make its own big league. The arrowhead element on the ‘A’ also evokes the feeling of a rising, uplifting beverage that goes above and beyond the status quo.       

The use of purple strikes a balance between category-dominant blues and reds, while its transition toward red is to connect with the young cola consumers familiar with the category.

“We set out to develop a contemporary brand for the confident young India. We believe branding is about helping consumers identify with the product and navigate better; whether through e-commerce or on retail shelves. Our work is always focused on people and guiding them towards the right choices,” explains Nidhi Isaac, Director – Brand & Design, Elephant.

“Rebranding Campa was once in a lifetime opportunity. How many independent brand agencies can claim to develop a megastar cola brand? With the ambition and resources of Reliance team, we had a solid backing for venturing into new ways of bringing the brand to life. As we had a consensus that Campa would be built on the codes of being confident, unpretentious, and highly differentiated, there was no need for creating multiple brands for different flavors as the attitude and promise would remain consistent across all Campa beverages. This would also be a ‘first’ in this category,” says Ashwini Deshpande, Co-founder & Director, Elephant.

Sports tech and media platform Sportzcraazy has announced the acquisition of media content platform Kabaddi Adda.

Sportzcraazy will be taking the majority and controlling stakes in Kabaddi Adda.

With this acquisition, the combined reach of Sportzcraazy and Kabaddi Adda will extend to a community of over 5 million monthly enthusiasts in India, with its social following in excess of 3 million giving them a clear leadership position in the digital Kabaddi space.

Sportzcraazy intends to host Kabaddi leagues and large-scale tournaments across the country to build local and regional player opportunities.

Founded by Vaibhav Jaiswal and Aditee Gulati, Sportzcraazy focuses on sports media, merchandise and events. They are also active investors in the sports tech ecosystem and aim to acquire more sports tech platforms going forward.

On asking about the acquisition, Vaibhav Jaiswal, Founder and CEO, Sportzcraazy, said “Having the largest community and with sports tech focused towards Kabbadi, the second most viewed sport in the country, we see vast opportunity in the sport. Sportzcraazy plans to work with kabbadi players through grass root engagement enabling regional players to showcase their talent.”

The last special address at the recently-held Pitch CMO Summit was delivered by one of the youngest speakers at the event. Aadit Palicha, co-founder and CEO, Zepto, spoke of the company's growth and on the topic of the address - 'Revolutionising the way India buys groceries'.

Palicha opened the session with the idea of what they have built in the last few months. “And more importantly, how we look at the dynamics of the business and how we look at the dynamics of the customers we serve.”

He first described the trajectory that they have had at Zepto. “Eighteen months ago, Zepto was doing zero rupees in sales and zero orders a day. Today, we have become one of the fastest-growing Internet companies in Indian history. From zero sales in July 2021, we went to making thousands of crores in annual sales in 18 months! Right now, we have close to two million monthly transacting users. More importantly, we are doing it organically, driven through better customer experience – be it speed, expanding assortment or improving the quality of our fresh fruits and vegetables.” 

Speaking on the philosophy behind that 18-month journey, he added, “When we look at the customer at Zepto and the way we have structured the business, effectively the way that we have designed our format and if you look at most online grocers have tried to design theirs, most players have built their business supply chain first.”

When you try to build a business in grocery without having any mindfulness of the way customers are buying groceries today, you end up having very limited penetration and, as a result, sub-optimal economics. He explained, “Today if you look at the thesis of building larger baskets to cover supply chain costs, which has been the predominant thesis in both offline and online groceries. What has ended up happening, as a result, if you look at the FMCG sector, is that there has been this gradual trend towards larger pack sizes and products. So, instead of, say, two or five kg packets, people are talking about 10 kg or 20 kg ones. And although that might seem like a benefit for the retailer and the customer, the reality is when you look at price-sensitive customers, they are not just concerned about the sticker prices of the products that they are buying but also deeply concerned about managing their own disposable cash flow. 

Drawing a parallel to a local kirana (grocery) store and larger-retail players, Palicaha explained, “The kirana store is technically more expensive than bigger retailers yet it continues to garner such an overwhelming command of customers' grocery wallet share. It's because the proximity of the kirana store to your house versus the large-scale supermarket chain actually puts you in a position where you can manage your disposable cash flow a lot better because you do not have to invest in transport to a supermarket.”

The Pitch CMO Summit saw the coming together of a host of professionals, veterans, and legends from across the media sphere in celebrating the often overlooked as well as learning from the best in the business.

Among the slew of engaging sessions held over the course of the summit, Nitin Saini, Vice President, Mondelez International, delivered a short but powerful address on ‘How Mondelez marries ideas and technology for brand building’.

Noting that Mondelez and its myriad brands are already well entrenched in the mind of the Indian consumer, Saini said, “What has really helped us reach this place is the strong emotional connection we’ve managed to build with consumers. That starts with having a strong purpose for each of our brands.”

“This is why it’s so important to have a brand purpose. For instance, in Cadbury Celebrations, the idea is run by generosity. The idea on top of that is helping the small retailers, and the idea on top of that is the machine learning technology," said Saini, referring to the much-vaunted ad starring Shah Rukh Khan, which won a Cannes Lion.    

Saini went on to showcase different ads of different products from the international conglomerate and how each connected with a unique touch point with different consumers.

So, when it comes to marrying ideas and technology in terms of brand building, Mondelez has a few keynotes. "The heart of it is getting to what the purpose of the brand is and it is not as easy as one might think. You have to go very deep into who the consumer is, what are their motivations, and what appeals to them. Once you get the brand purpose, that's what provides the tailwinds to everything else you do,” concluded Saini.  

At the Indian Magazine Congress 2023, industry leaders across the magazine and the media industry came to share insights on magazines and advertising. Following the panel discussions, the media experts discussed how magazines can participate in enhancing brand engagement with their communities. The list of panellists included Anita Nayyar, COO-Media, Branding & Communications, Patanjali Ayurveda Limited; Mohit Joshi, CEO at Havas Media Group India: Jean-Paul Reparon, Managing director, AgriMedia & BatavierenBende. The session was moderated by B Srinivasan, Managing Director, Vikatan Group. 

Srinivasan opened the session by talking about how the magazine has always been quintessentially a storyteller and brands always valued storytelling. He further raised the question that how living in the digital arena, we can see magazines becoming a brand as they were used to be before. Answering the question, Anita said, “Despite knowing that magazines have lost their sheen with time, we must look at the communities magazines have built over the years and the way brands have been engaging with those communities. Magazines need to reengineered and reinvent themselves to cater to the brand's demands in the current arena.”

Furthermore, Mohit mentioned how traditional media contributed a major proportion to the brand’s ROIs in the earlier days when magazines played a decisive role in advertising. He said, “Today brands are intensively concentrating more on getting the return from the investment instead of focusing on content, to build a brand. Previously brands were focusing on brand building using magazines, but now with fast-evolving and ever-growing market demands, brands try to get abundant returns in the given period, debunking the fundamentals of making a brand. With the changing time, agencies need to update their methods of engaging with the audience using the magazine as a medium.”

However, Anita shared a little different view on Magazines and ROI; she shares that brand and magazines must cater to the audience demand in a given period to build sustainability in the market. By creating more personalised experiences and contextual targeting, a brand can expect returns in the available time. 

Sharing more on how content is an essence of ROI and how magazines help in brand building, Jean said, “If the content is not fabricated in a more engaging and informative manner then the brand will never be able to create a valuable impact on their audiences.” In addition, Mohit said, “When the magazine is bought for the content and the brand is integrated into it then it creates a tremendous impact on the audience. Recently, we are preparing content for Hyundai where they have signed five women cricketers and we are covering their issues targeting different magazines.” Anita added and said, “Patanjali is the largest FMCG brand today, we are a firm believer in print because of the credibility and audience engagement it has built and maintained over the years. We are resonating Ayurveda and reaching the right audience using the right media vehicle.” Talking more in the discourse of the regional market, Anita mentioned that down the south due to high literacy levels and other regional market factors, people are more into reading, which signifies the high ROI for brands that penetrate well into the markets.” 

The Pitch CMO Summit Mumbai held on March 24, brought top industry leaders for a panel discussion on adopting agile marketing. The panellists were Esha Nagar, Managing Director – APAC, Nepa; Hareesh Tibrewala, Joint Chief Executive Officer, Mirum India; Jaya Jamrani, VP – Marketing, Castrol India; Manasi Narasimhan, VP and Head, Marketing & Communications, South Asia, Mastercard; Nikhil Gulati, GM – Marketing, Clovia; Sapangeet Rajwant, Head – Marketing and Digital, Hindi Mass Entertainment, Viacom18; Vanda Ferrao, CMO, WOW Skin Science and Vivek Bhargava, Co-founder, Profit Wheel. The session was moderated by Jaiti Hariani, Sales Director, DoubleVerify.

Kickstarting the session, Hariani asked the panellists about their definition of agile marketing and how it varies from traditional marketing. To this, Bhargava said, “The biggest challenge is not only the mindset. Most brands know what the customers do with them in terms of transactions. But there are no platforms that give you real-time insights into what the consumer is thinking today. If somebody could create which is real-time, that would help as a base for all kinds of decisions you take on media buying or creative strategy or content creation. So, I think the biggest challenge is data on a real-time basis to take such decisions. If we can solve this problem, then agile marketing can be better.”

“Agile marketing is all about responsive marketing. But more importantly, I think it requires a mindset shift. I also think that agile marketing is more like an organisational structural change where you have to completely pivot yourself from the traditional to the modern cues. It’s so much about consumer interactions and what they think about your documents and plans because you are re-gearing and re-shifting. It is also about acting on the change than sticking to a plan and details. Therefore for me, agile marketing is so pivotal that requires so much buying across the organisation otherwise it is a failure,” Nagar added.

Talking about having an agile marketing strategy to overcome challenges from a BFSI perspective, Narasimhan elucidated, “We are living in an incredibly cluttered world. We are a very behind-the-scenes payment brand because let’s face it, all of us pay every single day with whatever mode of payment. We want it to be seamless, safe and efficient. The success in this is not to think about payments because if you have to call up your bank or somebody, then it actually means we haven’t done our job. However, the trick here also is to find out what are consumers interested in. it is about getting a real insight and once you get it, then tell it in an evocative way.”

Rajwant stated that television marketing has seen a paradigm shift from when she started back 20 years to now. “We are a typical mass brand and we cater to across categories of audiences. We are TG pans from the grassroots level who lives in the heartland to a niche person who is sitting, let’s say, in Hyderabad, Bangalore or Mumbai. Similarly, when our audience set is so vast, our marketing has to pan across to all those people. While we are a mass general entertainment brand, but we look at our consumers in a very pyramid format. As brands, we need loyalists. It is when we engage with the consumers on a regular basis,” she pointed out.

Gulati talked about the shift in the consumers’ buying pattern post-pandemic when he said, “During the pandemic, all categories shifted online. We saw consumers buying rampantly online because firstly, it was the need of the hour and secondly, more and more categories were available online. For Clovia, we saw exponential growth in loungewear and activewear. As people were at home, they were trying to get healthier and fitness was a way of life. As a result, people adopted activewear and its sales zoomed up. On the contrary, bra sales fell flat. So accordingly, we had to adjust our working capital and deploy our production, and marketing budgets from one category to the other as per the requirement of the business. Post-pandemic in 2021, we saw a surge of shoppers coming online but in 2022, that surge has now plateaued. People are back to offline stores and I think maybe it is pent-up demand. I was going through data a few days back that 93 per cent of India is still shopping offline. So, while we have always been a digital-first brand, we are ramping up our offline presence now.”

“At WOW Skin Science, we are always an idea of the first company and I think what we did prior to the pandemic actually kept a good stead to extract the maximum. So, our agility comes from identifying trends. We always keep an eye on search volumes. Innovation is fuelled by interesting formulations in great-looking packaging and smelling wonderful. We had the entire funnel set up. We go to nearly 4000 influencers on a monthly basis. They tell consumers how to use it, textures, results etc. and we can directly check on how our traffic comes to our channels. The pandemic has helped us to increase our households by around five times growth,” Ferrao stated.

Tibrewala explained how being in a leadership position one can cultivate an agile mindset for the team and encourage them to adopt a marketing approach. “Agile marketing is the way we need to behave. A couple of years back we had set up an agile pod for the organisation. An agile pod comprises of resources like a copywriter, designer, HTML programmer, creative technologist, and brand strategist and it is run by a scrum master. I believe the concept of agile marketing comes from agile software development. We should use waterfall development where you would build everything and then keep on getting customers buying in shorter cycles,” he added.

Concluding the session, Jamrani noted, “Castrol in India is about 130 year old brand. It also means that they have people who have worked in a certain style and fashion which is the traditional FMCG automotive style of working where you do seasonal campaigns and cyclic marketing. Being able to put money behind agility is not really a buzzword but you need to be able to go back to your top management or whoever your stakeholders are to say that by going agile and by adopting this new change, I have been able to show x million dollars savings and benefits to the company which is then you will get a lot of buy-ins and a lot of training that you need to make that agile engine move in the organisation.”

A one-of-a-kind sports-focused survey, by sports brand PUMA India and research & analytics firm Nielsen Sports, has unearthed startling insights that indicate a huge lag in inspiration in the country to pursue physical fitness, even as India is witnessing a growth in the adoption of sports culture. The exclusive study was conducted to deep dive into the nation’s perception and extent of participation in sports and fitness activities among adults and kids in the country.   

Based on the report findings, PUMA launched the ‘Let There Be Sport’ campaign featuring Virat Kohli, MC Mary Kom and Sunil Chetri today to question the conventional mindset that sports is a digression from academics. The brand affirmed to champion the cause of sport and advocate it as a life skill. The movement comes with the aim to disband the word ‘extra’ used typically for the subject of sport and integrate it into the main curriculum of educational institutions across the country. 

PUMA also released a Digital Film today featuring its brand ambassadors Virat Kohli, MC Mary Kom, Sunil Chhetri, Avani Lekhara, to Bhagwani Devi and everyday athletes. Created by Ogilvy & Mather India, the 90-second film launched on PUMA India’s social handles on Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, captured the archetypal need to call sport an extra-curricular activity, and in turn advocated the increased adoption of sports culture to foster the overall development of the nation. 

The PUMA – Nielsen report stated: 

• In the last 12 months, 68% of adults in Urban India claimed to have participated in fitness-related activities. 

• Only 20% of adults in urban India meet the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended index of a minimum of 150-300 minutes of physical exercise per week. 

• Kids spend a mere 86 minutes of the WHO-recommended 420 minutes or more on an average per week. Shockingly, this is lesser than that of Adults who invest 101 minutes of fitness activity per week. 

• Kids in the East region spend the most time playing sport & fitness (125 minutes per week), vs the West at lowest average (68 mins) 

• Direct correlation was found between Kids with high sports participation and improved academic performance. 

• Among Adults that exercised in the last 12 months, more Females (42%) participated in sports & fitness related activities on a daily basis than Males (36%). 

• Adults with high sports participation are likely to exhibit more positive emotions than adults in general by 21%. 

• Yoga (37%), Jogging (29%), Running (28%) and Cricket (28%) are the most actively participated sports & fitness related activities by adults, in the last 12 months. 

• 54% adults prefer self-guided workouts post pandemic. 

Both kids and adults listed Lack of Time as the primary barrier to participating in sports and physical activities, followed by other challenges such as lack of facilities and high cost. 

The shocking report, which is part of PUMA’s sports-focused study on the ‘Let There Be Sport’ initiative, has emerged as the catalyst for the country’s leading sports brand to become the driver of change and champion the cause of prioritising sport and fitness in the country.  

Commenting on the report and its findings, Abhishek Ganguly, Managing Director, PUMA India and Southeast Asia said, “As a nation, we have witnessed a fundamental change in adoption of sports culture with far more running communities, gyms and people taking up different sports. However, we have just scratched the surface and have miles to go. The PUMA - Nielsen Sport study proves that there are still significant areas for development. The study indicates the growing need to create awareness and inspiration among adults and kids to play more sport as well as illustrates the myriad ways in which sport adds value to life. There is a direct correlation between sports participation in kids and improved academic performance and positive emotional wellbeing. A strong sports culture brings out the best in people and is critical for the development of a country.”  

The PUMA-Nielsen sports survey was conducted across 16 cities, with 4280 respondents aged from 18-65 years of age (including parents of kids aged between 6-18). 

“PUMA’s new platform, Let There Be Sport, will be our priority this year. It will promote and encourage sport and fitness as a life skill. We will heavily invest in creating awareness towards sports adoption at a mass level, build more moments of inspiration, continue to support grassroot athletes and work closely with key stakeholders across sectors to integrate sports and fitness into the main curriculum. In five years, we are confident that a sports-focussed survey will yield better insights in India,” added Ganguly. 

Nielson Sports has a history of presenting a clear and comprehensive picture of the sporting landscape and its association with PUMA to bring out this revolutionary report, is a game-changer for the upliftment of sports in the country. 

Denise Menasan, Managing Director for APAC & MENA at Nielsen Sports & Entertainment, said, “A study was commissioned by PUMA India to help understand the views of sports in India and how sports & physical activity impacts other aspects of our life, such as emotional wellbeing, academics and employability. While there have been multiple initiatives to boost fitness-related activities, our study indicates that more needs to be done in this space. The study highlights that an increase in sports and fitness activities can help enhance overall emotional wellbeing amongst adults, help learn valuable life skills and increase academic grades of kids. We hope this campaign from PUMA India inspires people to become more physically active in their day-to-day activities and equips government agencies with data to frame new policies.”

PUMA has been actively contributing to the rise of sports culture in the country and this report will go a long way in helping the brand fulfil its goal of creating a sports-friendly and fit India.