Warming up the market for a cold product

bangalore: in a fiercely competitive and fragmented ice cream market and with amul snapping closely at its heels, hll''s ice cream division is onto a newfound aggression in product launches and a change in strategy. with kwality walls being one of hll''s chosen 30 power brands, the division will focus on marketing the mother brand as against individual sub-brands and roll out four to five `exciting'' products every summer.stay out of price wars and target the discerning consumer is the new mantra. j.h. mehta, executive director (ice creams), told the times of india there will be two new products in the take-home category (black currant sundae and viennetta) and three in impulse buying (super cornetto, cornetto soft and feast bar) offered this year. for the first time, vanilla is being relaunched as an off-white, more creamy vanilla gold, which mehta said is a unique flavour developed for india by the r&d division here. viennetta, which was a premium, imported ice cream priced at rs 175, is now being manufactured here and will be priced at rs 125. cornetto ole and vanilla classic will be phased out this year. the softee ice cream has been rebranded as cornetto soft and with the targeted 250 all-india softee outlets to be in place soon, is expected to account for 30 per cent of the turnover. the usp of all these products is they are innovative and hence, the company hopes, not very easy for the competition to reproduce (read amul, which has been going strong on low prices courtesy cheaper milk procurement and well-established distribution network). for the price conscious, there is the max sub-brand beginning at rs 5. mehta was mum on investments but said unilever''s global ice creams division spends 2-3 per cent of its turnover (which was 5 billion euros last fiscal) on r&d and this is true for india too. hll''s ice cream division''s published turnover was rs 162 crore last year. market shares are a contentious issue in the rs 600-crore organised ice cream market. but as per org data covering 300 markets, kwality walls has a 50-55 per cent market share. amul has been aggressively courting the interiors and small towns in india to beef up its nationwide presence. but the kwality walls brand is much stronger in big cities and towns and that focus will be retained, mehta said.