A Refreshment Beverage for urban and rural audience

This case takes me back by a decade or more.. the brief was about a pre-packed refreshment beverage to be launched in a tropical country. The twist was that the product was to be launched in both urban and rural geographies. These regions differ greatly in terms of disposable income, product preference and communication approaches.

For me, as part of the research team, the first step was to design a sample which will cover the target audience, without blowing up the project cost too much.

Once that was set, we focused on getting the communication right. We tested a variety of concepts with consumers - tackling various versions of the key selling messages (taste, refreshment, ingredient), the credibility levers (brand, ingredient) and pack size (small, big, multipack).

In parallel, we also did packaging evaluation, to land with a packaging that did justice to the winning communication approach. Pack size took some time to tackle as the two geographies had different preferences on price per purchase.

In the end, we helped our client land with a communication, packaging and pack size approach which could work for this urban and rural launch. While communication and pack size was uniform across the country, the pack strategy was more nuanced, because a unified approach was not seeming too customer centric.

Was it a good launch? Well, the product is on the shelf even today!