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29 JUL, 2010, 12.53AM IST, KALA VIJAYRAGHAVAN,ET BUREAU

Ambush marketing: HUL's last-minute surprise foxes

P&G
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Read more on »unilever|pepsi|pantene|hul|dove

Procter & Gamble Hygiene & Healthcare Ltd.

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MUMBAI: It was quick and it was smart. It was an ambush in the skies that Hindustan Unilever launched
against archrival Procter & Gamble, spoiling the latter’s elaborately laid-out plans for its shampoo brand
Pantene.

The story starts on July 23, when Mumbai woke up to hoardings that screamed: ‘A Mystery Shampoo!!
80% women say is better than anything else’. P&G, it was later found, was planning to unveil the new
Pantene on August 1.

When the suits at HUL found out, they saw an opportunity to score a point. They ambushed P&G. On July
28, even as the P&G hoardings stood tall on its skyline, Mumbai woke up to another hoarding that was
upfront, and suggestive of its source of inspiration. It said: ‘There is no mystery. Dove is the No.1
shampoo’. Dove is one of the four brands in HUL’s shampoo portfolio.

The HUL national campaign took just one day to go from brief to execution, and was handled by Ogilvy &
Mather India. Says a senior official who was involved in the campaign: “This was the quickest advertising
turnaround in the company’s history.” An integrated brand campaign normally takes six weeks.

HUL’s quick repartee was partly the outcome of Unilever CEO Paul Polman empowering the company’s
managers earlier this year to take on-the-spot decisions to counter competition. The P&G response was
terse. Without naming HUL, a company spokeseperson said: “One of our international competitors has
been consistently trying to denigrate our brands, via either disparaging advertising or unsubstantiated
claims across categories.”

It’s classic ambush advertising, a company feeding off its competitor’s campaign. It’s something the
Indian advertising landscape hasn’t seen enough of. Some of the exceptions have been Jet and
Kingfisher, Coke and Pepsi, among others.

For instance, when Coke bagged the official sponsorship rights to the 1996 cricket world cup in the
subcontinent, Pepsi came up with this tag line for itself: ‘Nothing official about it’.

It comes with the territory, says Jagdeep Kapoor, managing director, Samsika Marketing Consultants, a
leading strategic marketing consultancy. “Teaser campaigns are vulnerable to such attacks,” he says.
“Companies should focus on consumers rather than the competition. Eventually, consumers will decide
based on the brand’s performance and image.”

Procter & Gamble has three shampoo brands in India: Pantene, Head & Shoulders, and Rejoice. And
Dove is one of the four brands in HUL’s shampoo portfolio, the others being Sunsilk, Clinic Plus and Clinic
All Clear.

Ironically, the leadership claims of both companies on the hoardings rests on their own research, that too
limited. For example, the P&G 80% contention is “based on a Thailand consumer test done by P&G
Japan in October 2008 among 1,200 women”.

Similarly, HUL’s claim on Dove is based on “winner hair care category, survey of over 30,000 people by
Nielsen”. A company official said Dove is the leader in the top-end shampoo segment with sales of Rs
200 crore in 2009-10.

People in the industry say companies are getting aggressive on the advertising front because consumer
spends on relatively discretionary purchases have been subdued due to food inflation. Growth in the
overall shampoo market has slowed from 17% in 2008 to 11% in 2009 and 9% in 2010 (till May).

The marketing and advertising wars are expected to intensify as neither company wants to lose market
share in emerging markets, which are still recording growth and have untapped potential..

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People in the industry say companies are getting aggressive on the advertising front because
consumer spends on relatively discretionary purchases have been subdued due to food inflation.