Reversing brand decline

Pepsodent Germicheck is Unilever’s leading brand in India. At its height it commanded 15% market share, but at the time they briefed us it had dropped to 4%. Other international brands had been taking market share but, more significantly, an upsurge in belief in Ayurvedic – traditional “more natural” – healthcare had meant that a number of local and regional brands had been taking very significant shares of the market.

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Unilever had done all the things that you would expect from a leading global company, including launching its own Ayurvedic brand, but their market share was continuing to fall.

?A different approach

Recognising that this problem required a different approach the Unilever team briefed The Marketing Clinic to find a more successful solution.

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While it is always important that a healthcare product does what it claims to do – that Pepsodent Germicheck does clean and protect teeth – for it to be successful what is even more important is that the consumer believes that it does.

?Focusing on emotions

Such belief is an emotional response to the brand rather than a logical one. Understanding how we can build that belief, and how it is undermined, is critical in understanding how we can manage our brand.

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The Marketing Clinic identified three main prompts that caused Indian consumers to change their toothpaste and the emotional drivers behind these. We understood the emotional triggers that caused consumers to move away from their current brand and the conscious and the unconscious emotional drivers that attracted them to new and different brands.

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Understanding emotional drivers

By understanding and focusing upon these emotional drivers - rather than the logical ones that consumers could talk to us so eloquently about - we were then able to explain the psychology behind consumers decisions and identify an optimal emotional experience of the brand, thus giving the Unilever team a series of very actionable recommendations for product and communications developments which helped to transform the consumers’ belief in the brand.

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A reformulated and repositioned Pepsodent Germicheck is now recovering market share in India. Building greater brand loyalty among current users and most significantly attracting more new users.

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Chris Lukehurst is a Consumer Psychologist and a Director at The Marketing Clinic:

Providing Clarity on the Psychological relationships between consumers and brands

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