How has Brand Fevicol evolved over the years has this evolution strengthened the brand’s key attributes?
We have always found innovative ways to tell people that Fevicol is the ultimate adhesive. In fact, since the time we started investing on brand building, Fevicol has made initiatives, which have appealed to everyone and has helped us in owning this proposition of bonding. Starting with Fevicol Marine in 2010, we had come out with the campaign showcasing the bonding strength of Fevicol even when furniture is exposed to water. Three years down the line the sales of Fevicol Marine has shot up by nine times. Similarly, learning from the experience of Fevicol Marine, Fevicol SpeedX was introduced in 2012, which gives you the same bonding strength of Fevicol but at a much faster speed. In the last one year the business for Fevicol SpeedX has grown three times in less than a year of its launch.
The specialised offerings seem have worked well for the mother brand. Are you also thinking of leveraging the Fevicol brand for launching more new extensions?
I agree that specialised offerings have worked well for us. Obviously the association with Fevicol makes our work much easier in extending the portfolio as the brand symbolises trust and quality. So, that is something we would not like to change even when we are diversifying into offering new solutions. But as far as adhesives are concerned, we would like to continue the strategy of offering superior and specialised variants under the Fevicol name.
So what are your plans for taking the brand into the future?
Fevicol is now a 53-year-old brand. The first 30 years, in fact, was all about winning the trust of consumers. Thanks to the quality of the product, Fevicol has successfully established itself as the first choice in the adhesive market. This phase, of building trust, continued from 1959 to the mid 1980s, or till the late ’80s. The next 20 years were all about building the brand proposition, which lasted from the 1990s to 2009/2010. That describes the journey Fevicol had for first 30 years and for the next 20. Thereafter, we have adopted the approach of strengthening the brand and at the same time offering more specialised variants to consumers. But the mother brand remains most critical to our business and you will get to see a lot of initiatives and a lot of creative work happening on the mother brand in the days ahead.
Your reach is pan-India now – you are present in rural India, you are selling in tier 2 & 3 cities. So what are your plans now in terms of distribution logistics?
We are present in more than 60,000 outlets across the country. But the next challenge is how to reach beyond tier 2 & 3 markets. We have formed a separate team, which is helping us now to reach to markets which have a population size of less than 10,000. And we have also formed a separate vertical, which connects all the markets with a population of less than 10,000. In this manner we have been able to cover more than 5,000 such markets apart from the mainline cities.
What’s the difference in your marketing mix now as compared to the 1950s or the ’60s?
Fevicol today has become part of our popular culture so it is not only about advertising. We are now very conscious of the role played by social media and that is something which is now part of our media mix going forward. The next challenge is going to be how effectively we make use of it to reach out to people, whom we may have have missed out on so far.
