Coffee Decoction

 

Atlast

 

Forward and backward integration are common in business and some brands smartly execute it and some clearly stay away from it. Large Brands tend to experiment a lot and they realise sooner or later if it is their territory or not. But the best part is they do try! Milk brands venture liberally into various categories such as Ice cream, Butter, Ghee, Curd, Milk Shakes, Panner, Cheese etc., Chocolates have extended to biscuits and health drinks, Food brands have moved to spices and masalas. The category examples can be many, but the point i wanted to highlight here was the launch of “Coffee Decoction” by Nescafe SUNRISE.

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eebrivkj9a0

 

Brooke Bond and Nescafe has been fighting the Instant Coffee market for ages and they have been launching variants under different names : Sunrise, Green Label, Bru, Nescafe Gold, Nescafe Original. Both the brands were keen on benchmarking themselves to “Filter Coffee” positioning hence the visual identities such as “Filter” “Dabara and Tumbler” etc., More competition in the form of Lavazza, Levista, Cothas started attacking these MNC brands aggressively. But the jolt to them came in the form of local brands trying to sell Decoction through bottles & sachets : Mambalam Iyers, Vivekananda Coffee, Leo Coffee, ID etc.,

 

These started eating into the shares of MNC brands as the “Instant” promise becomes questionable. I think after a lot of deliberations Nescafe has reacted with its  Sunrise Liquid Decoction and a communication too to gow this category. While the pricing might be on the higher end, but that’s the premium the brand deserves. With this I am sure Brooke Bond too will jump into the race making this Liquid Decoction category a lot busier. Leaders in a category should have led this with their innovations , unfortunate that they have been pulled into it through the smaller brands. We need to wait and see how these perform in the long run.