NEW AGE MARKETING

CASE SUBMISSION
Submitted by Group 2
10/13/2019
 SENSORY BRANDING: PAPERBOAT IN INDIAN CONTEXT

Mr. Neeraj Kakkar after having a successful career of 8 years with Coca-Cola Beverages Ltd.
started Hector Beverages in 2009 along with Suhas Misra, James Nuttall, Neeraj Biyani. They
launched Frissia, protein drink followed by energy drink, Tzinga in 2011. One fine day, all were
having lunch at office table wherein Misra was telling his childhood story when his mother
would pack him Aam Panna every day. This is when the idea of bringing traditional drinks of
India was born, shifted the focus to ethnic drinks segment and Paper Boat brand was launched.
Drinks and food have been a salient part of Indian culture. The taste of these recipes,
unadulterated and pure has been engraved in our memories. Even the mention of their recipes
brings to mind pleasant memories of our childhood.
There were big competitors in the category; hence the company chose to position itself on the
business landscape which had no direct competition. They started such childhood recipes of
these drinks and considered impact of multiple senses including smell, taste, touch and color
while designing the product. They came up with flavors like aam-panna, jal-jeera, thandai to
name a few, which were the obvious choices as they wanted to build the brand around simplicity,
natural, unadulterated happiness of childhood.
Unlike other big brands they didn’t have the budget to reach mass audiences though media but
Hector foods thought of it as one of the biggest opportunities, to tell a story with the brand name
itself. They differentiated the brand on its name and the packaging of the product. As kids all of
us made paper-boats which we used to sailed in some nearby pool. It wasn’t just a boat but a ship
to sail through the seven seas. This was the key idea behind “Paper boat: Drinks and memories”.
For Hector Beverages still there were big questions waiting:
a) How can they differentiate through packaging?
b) What other flavors they should launch?
c) How should they communicate the Paper Boat positioning to the target customers?
d) How could the brand sustain itself effectively?
With limited budget in hand, all of them sat together to formulate marketing plan and sensory
branding strategy to form a unique imagery of the brand in consumer’s mind and achieve scale.
ABOUT BRAND CHOSEN: PAPERBOAT

Introduction

Hector beverages manufacturer of Paper Boat was founded by Neeraj Biyani and Neeraj Kakkar.
The sequoia capital backed company entered the market in 2010 with an energy drink Tzinga.
The company has identified the lack of non-carbonated beverages in Indian market and has
shifted its focus and positioned itself as an ethnic juice brand.

Paper Boat was able to create a niche by launching local products such as Panakam in South
India and Thandai in the North. The company currently manufactures juices in twelve flavours
and the most prominent juices are coconut, mango, sugarcane, pomegranate. Industry experts
believe that the Indian juice drinks market will grow exponentially in the coming years. The
government’s policy that every carbonated drink must contain at least 2% of the fruit pulp to
improve the health of the citizens and productivity of farmers boost this Industry at least by
trifold in the next 8 years.

Competitors

With the change in the consumer preference towards the aerated drinks, the giants like PepsiCo
and Coca Cola are also forced to enter into the Indian juice market. The coca cola is leading the
packaged juice category with Minute Maid and Maaza brands. Other major competitors include
Dabur’s Real, Parle Agro’s Frooti and PepsiCo’s Slice and Tropicana. Another FMCG giant ITC
also launched its own juice brand B Natural. Considering all the competitors fighting for the
same market segment and with the big deep pockets of its global competitors Paper Boat has a
tough road to grow ahead.

Current Marketing Plan of Paper Boat

The winning formula of Paper Boat was mainly due to its focus on ethnic juices and the funky
digital marketing mainly focused on evoking the nostalgia through story telling. Paper Boat has
also partnered with Nissin Foods to improve its distribution system in India. The marketing
campaigns are targeted towards the millennials of urban India. The geographical target was
planned with the focus to target the communities that had left their homes to other parts of the
country in pursuit of work and domestic demands. Using poetry instead of lyrical music, the
story unfolds through both, visuals and audio. The return to an innocent and naïve time that
everyone associates with the grand epithet of “the good old days” was re-created through the
combination of animation that reminds one of simpler times.

ABOUT SENSORY MARKETING

Sensory elements include the sense of smell – olfaction, sound – audition, sight – vision, taste –
taste and touch – haptics. These senses play a big role in brand experiences.

Sensory marketing is a form of marketing which influences these five senses of a consumer,
affecting her perception, judgement and behavior towards any product.

a) Smell: The sense of smell helps in reminiscing memories. According to Neuro-marketing, 75

percent of the emotions are triggered by the sense of smell.

b) Acoustics: It is the sense of sound. Sounds play a very important role, as for any brand, the
degree of congruence between the expectation and reality determines the evaluation of the brand
in terms of positivity or negativity i.e. the higher the congruence, the more the positivity for the
brand.

c) Vision: It is the most governing senses of all. It has the capability to dominate over other
senses as well.

d) Taste: Taste determines brand loyalty and is susceptible to external factors like physical
attributes of a product, product information, packaging of the product, communication etc.

e) Haptics: Touch is a form of sense which can be instrumental – touch which is functional and
specific to an objective i.e. to decide whether to purchase a product, and autotelic – touch which
happens for the sake of touch i.e. for fun.
SECONDARY RESEARCH

Purchase intention variables for Beverage Industry in general

According to a study on ‘Factors impacting consumer preference and purchase intention: With
special reference to beverage industry’ published in 3rd International Conference on recent
innovation in science, technology, management and environment’ majorly four factors were
identified impacting the purchase intention for fruit-based drinks i.e. Marketing, Value, Health
and Texture as mentioned in Exhibit 1.

Characteristics determining consumer preferences for specific fruit drinks industry

According to Exhibit 2, one of the most important characteristic is flavor which contributes to
42% of the consumers’ decision while purchasing fruit based drink. Brand Loyalty is the next
most influencing factor contributing 30% in decision making while the other two factors Filling
and Health didn’t contribute majorly in consumer preferences for fruit based drinks.

The above research highlights key factors which Paper Boat included as their product
characteristics and in brand communication.

PAPER BOAT UTILIZING SENSORY MARKETING ELEMENTS

1. Product

Paper Boat effectively utilized product design to position itself in the highly competitive
landscape of beverage industry. Starting with the brand name itself, founders thought what
would be the most appropriate name to rekindle memories in customer’s mind. They thought
what could be more relatable to childhood than making Paper Boat from the torn page of a
school notebook and came up with the name ‘Paper Boat’.

a) Vision: Simple visual landscape and colors inspired by nature communicate simplicity and
purity of the drinks making the person feel nostalgic

b) Taste: Flavors chosen by the brand are the one which remind consumers of what their mother
or grandmother used to prepare at homes or what they used to fight over in childhood
c) Touch: Standee pouches were used with a paper like feel to make Paper Boat drinks an
experience and give nostalgic feeling of holding the fruit in their little hands in childhood

2. Brand Communication

Nostalgia is a human emotion that creates emotional connectivity with the subject. It ignites the
sense of belongingness in the minds of the individuals. People start feeling an actual connect
with their past. Thus, all in all evoking the feeling of nostalgia is a very powerful element of
sensory marketing.

In fact, the name Paper Boat is in itself an inspiration drawn from the commonplace practice
followed by the kids during the olden times, when they used to tear the back page of their school
notebooks to create a paper boat which could be launched in the puddle of water outside their
homes or in their backyards on rainy afternoons. The thought in itself evokes so much memories
and emotions and a sense of nostalgia among the brand’s target audience who essentially are in
the age group of 20-40 years. It is targeted towards those individuals who are dwelling in Tier I
and Tier II cities and are living away from their homes.

Paper Boat over the years has managed to build its brand equity on two main factors – Nostalgia
and Simplicity. Their content of communication has always been in the form of storytelling
which revolves around the olden times especially the 1990s. They manage to strum the right
chord through their nostalgia driven advertisements.

In their communications, they show how a person who was a kid in the 1990s, is all grown up
now and is reminiscing the period of her childhood while having Paper Boat juices in her
adulthood. The advertisements transport the viewers back to that period thereby successfully
forming connect with them. Also, they successfully manage to create an impact on their viewers,
thereby prompting them to recall how easier and simpler their lives used to be, back in those
times when they were kids.

They have also launched an advertisement narrated by Gulzar, with the tone of Malgudi Days
playing in the back.

In addition, the brand has successfully managed to evoke the feeling of sentimentality in the
minds of the people because of the very fact that Paper Boat has brought in some core localized
Indian flavours among their portfolio, which caused the people to relate to with the brand. This
has caused its target group to associate such flavours with their childhood for example people
associates Aamras and Aam Panna with summers when their mothers used to give them after
they used to come back from schools.

Along with TV commercials, Paper Boat ran print ads, billboards as well as social media
advertisements. In all these mediums of communication, what remained common was the
brand’s ability to remain true to its central theme of ‘nostalgia’. On the social media platforms
such as Facebook and Twitter, Paper Boat has created a lot of engaging content such as they got
their fans and customers to share the stories of their childhood and moments on the Paper Boat
page. Word of mouth has also created a very positive image for the brand. They launched videos
in which they assimilated all the moments of ‘pure nostalgia’ such as how to make a paper boat.
They launched social media campaigns such as FloatABoat – encouraging people to create a
paper boat, launch it into a puddle, click a picture of it and post it online using hashtag
FloatABoat. In turn Paper Boat will donate Rs. 20 towards children’s education. The essence of
their social media campaigns has been innocence and simplicity.

In their YouTube campaign Drinks and Memories, they launched four videos – Rizwan, Hope –
The Boat, When I Grow up and Life is Still Beautiful, they brought in the importance of the
sense of smell and taste, which apart from the sense of sight are as important and can
successfully transport someone back to the good old times.

CONCLUSION

As evident from Paper Boat sensory branding case, creating a multi-sensory brand sensory
experience can be vital to build long term relationship and loyalty with your target audience.
Sensory marketing offers a new way of communicating with the customers by appealing to
multiple senses – smell, touch, taste, sight and sound which have a tremendous effect on
influencing customer perception, behavior and judgement. A study by MillWard Brown and
L.Lindstrom shows that the perceived value of the product is correlated to number of senses a
brand can appeal to. Thus, firms by utilizing sensory marketing not only create a unique
experience for the customers but can achieve high brand loyalty helping them achieve success
and firm objectives in long run.
REFERENCES

1) Kirthi Jayakumar, Dec 16 2015, Case Study: Paper Boat – Quenching thirst by rekindling memories,
viewed 8 October 2019, from https://inception.net.in/case-study-paper-boat

2) Roopchund Randhir, April 2016, Analyzing the impact of Sensory Marketing on Consumers:
A case study of KFC, viewed 8 October 2019,
from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309154767_Analyzing_the_Impact_of_Sensory_
Marketing_on_Consumers_A_Case_Study_of_KFC

3) Delhi School of Internet Marketing, July 27 2016, CASE STUDY: How PaperBoat is building
its brand story with superb marketing strategy, viewed 8 October 2019,
from https://dsim.in/blog/2016/07/27/case-study-how-paperboat-is-building-its-brand-story-
with-superb-marketing-strategy/

4) Exchange4media Staff, August 30 2017, Monsoon ads that make one feel warm and
fuzzy, viewed 8 October 2019, from https://www.exchange4media.com/advertising-
news/monsoon-ads-that-make-one-feel-warm-and-fuzzy-70310.html

5) ADGULLY BUREAU, May 10 2016, Memory is our strictest benchmark: Paper Boat's
Neeraj Kakkar on Rizwan, viewed 8 October 2019, from https://www.adgully.com/memory-is-
our-strictest-benchmark-paper-boat-s-neeraj-kakkar-on-rizwan-66655.html

6) Natalia Buitrago Hinestroza, The effects of sensory marketing on the implementation of fast-
food marketing campaigns, viewed 8 October 2019,
from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d794/3d025caed62ea7bb9a43111df636315f4eb1.pdf
 EXHIBIT 1: Competitors

Company Name Brand Name Fruit Content Variants

Coca Cola Minute Maid 7.5% 6
Coca Cola Maaza 19.5% 1
PepsiCo Slice 13% 3
PepsiCo Nimbooz 5% 2
PepsiCo Tropicana 20%-45% 12
Parle Frooti 16% 1
Hector Beverages Paper Boat 8%-45% 12

EXHIBIT 2: Factors impacting consumer purchase intention in Beverage Industry

*Marketing is a function of three independent variables of Packaging, Brand and Advertising as

evident from above factor analysis results. Similar interpretation can be done for Value, Health
and Texture.
EXHIBIT 3: Utility chart - Understanding consumer preference when selecting fruit drink

EXHIBIT 4: Brand Communications

The story of Rizwan

In this story telling, the main protagonist is Rizwan, who is a visually impaired old man. He lives
alone with his dog. He reminisces his childhood while making a cup of tea, which reminds him
of his mother – what she used to say to him and how she used to keep him away from harm. She
had named him Rizwan as she believed he was the protector of the Earth. She used to tell him
stories of how he would one day save a princess from demons. The story shows how Rizwan
lives in his own world of imagination.
The story of Hope – The Boat

In this story, a boat is shown which fights against all odds and adversities during its journey to
reach its goal. They show the boat’s encounter with a mouse, a bus as well as with natural
calamities such as rains and heavy winds. Contrary to these they also show a protective dog that
protects the boat from sudden splashes of rain representing how there is always something good
associated with the problems that one faces in life. Eventually, the story shows how the boat flies
with the wind and manages to reach its destination. The story shows how there is always a ray of
hope that keeps one moving in life.

The story of When I Grow Up

The idea behind this story is to emphasize the fact that how childhood is not just a phase. It is
something which indeed is boundless by time. It is in fact something that stays with us till the
end. The story unfolds by showing tiny moments in life where we relapse into our childhood,
showing how we are all just kids and will always be.

EXHIBIT 5: Creatives