Mango Frooti – Growing Up Part 2

Recent Times

The name Frooti has become generic to the category of fruit drinks in Tetra Brik packs to some extent. A colleague of mine had once shared with me an interesting anecdote; for some reason he had happened to ask a friend of his whether he had ever heard of Jumpin, the reply he got was, “Oh Jumpin Mango Frooti, of course I have heard of it!” That was years ago, a few days ago someone visited this blog while searching for ‘Jumpin Frooti’. This shows how strong Frooti has become in the category of fruit drinks in Tetra Brik packs.

Jumpin’s performance improved to a great extent in the late 1990s thanks to improved distribution on one hand and more focused advertising on the other, while Frooti was miles ahead Jumpin was slowly and steadily gaining ground. Unfortunately Godrej decided to make some changes in Jumpin’s distribution policy, as a result of which the brand lost most of its market share. Today Godrej Jumpin has only a token presence in the market place and is an insignificant brand. Godrej had also launched another fruit drink in Tetra pack -- Xs; I could never figure out the reason behind introducing a new Tetra pack drink when they should have invested in brand Jumpin which already had some degree of awareness and popularity. As expected, Xs flopped.

As I have said in my earlier post that Tetra pack drinks automatically appealed to children, however there is a risk in targeting children because their preferences change as they grow up. They move on to bottled drinks perhaps by imitating others. Frooti the undisputed leader in the category had faced some set back about a decade ago and then the Digen Verma teaser campaign was launched, interestingly the famous line Mango Frooti Fresh n Juicy was not used in this campaign. Watch the commercial below and for more on this visit: Relaunch of Frooti-The 'Digen Verma' Campaign and Digen Verma not a 'teaser', says Everest

       

Instead of targeting children Parle Agro, the company that manufactures and markets Frooti, prefers to target the child in an adult.  I also get the feeling that they have been trying to target young adults who enjoyed Frooti when they were kids and the tall & slim pack made the task easier. There have been several campaigns over the years.

India Badal Gaya, Lekin India Ka favorite fruit drink nahi (2007):

Really wild (Shows different packages):

Mango ke liye pite:

Introduction of the PET bottle made it still easier to target adults or rather the child in the adult who wants to have fun, hence the tagline ‘WHY GROW UP’. Although Frooti is targeted at adults its different packages make it appealing to different age segments. Frooti which was the leader in Tetra pack category now faces competition from various brands of mango drinks in PET bottles, such as Mangola, Slice, Mazaa and some others.

What makes Frooti’s advertising stand out from the clutter is that its advertising has taken the reality route. Last year it was the prank series where huge sized mangoes were shown falling and tumbling to the utter surprise of the unsuspecting public and this summer we saw mango theme games, where adults are shown having fun.

For more on this year’s summer campaign read - It's all fun and games with Frooti. Watch one of the commercials below:

 

I am quite eager to see what they do next summer.