Bisleri

Bisleri a brand name synonymous to mineral water in India. It has approximately 60% market share in packaged drinking water in country. Brand is owned by Parle Company, which bought over Bisleri in 1969 from Italian company. Initially, Bisleri faced the problems of acceptance from consumers. It was difficult to advertise for a company something as a bottled water, which is colourless, tasteless and odourless. In mid eighties company changed its packaging to PET bottles which shows transparency and clear water to consumers. This gave mineral water market a boost.

In India, water is scarce and quality is poor so initially the consumers were only foreigners and NRI’s. Therefore, to increase its customer’s base, company came up with comfortable and affordable price bottle which was a great success and showed 400% growth.

India bottled water market is appox is worth Rs 1,000-1,200 crore (Rs 10-12billion). Seeing this growth over the years, many new players have entered the market. Amongst them Kinely from Coke, Aquafine from Pepsi, kingfisher and now Himalayan from Tata are main players of industry. There are many ups and down in last couple of years but brand recall of Bisleri is amazing which helped company. In order to differentiate form other players company tries to come up with different and new campaigns on regular intervals

In case of food and water, whenever people are suspicious of the quality of product they don’t eat unhygienic food and instead of having non purified water they prefer to stay thirsty. Bisleri itself seems to play on this need for safety, coining the popular tag-line ‘Play it safe’. The advertising helped differentiate the product from its competitors who, more or less, communicated nothing. Bisleri’s seal was also breakaway (hence irreplaceable), even though this manufacturing process of sealing seems to be slow and could clog up the assembly line.

Somewhere along the now that space was occupied by Aquafina and Kinley. The “safe” breakaway seal was replaced by a regular seal, but the change wasn’t communicated and more variants (packaging) emerged. Some of these variants were sold simultaneously. They were manufactured in different parts of Delhi, and one had the website www.bisleri.com printed on it, while the other had www.bisleri.co.in printed.

So, the mistake was a complete lack of communication on Bisleri’s part. Now they have a new product out - a mineral water brand (as opposed to a packaged drinking water brand), and they are advertising it. Still, there are three types of Bisleri bottles in the market in Delhi right now.

Now again Bisleri changed its packaging and came up with a new bottle. It has been general feeling that Kinley’s new packaging is more acceptable by the people as it is easy to grip it. In a packaged water market, where the product is not so differentiated, the company has to constantly innovate new branding techniques, distribution channels, advertising and in fact new packaging techniques.