Britvic Soft Drinks Has A Long And Illustrious

Britvic: Creating a Brand Flavor

Britvic Soft Drinks has a long and illustrious history in the world of brands. The company that makes the juices was founded in the middle of the 19th century in Great Britain. The firm's juices were first produced in 1938, and were a source of vitamin C during the Great Depression. The juices were always sold in small bottles to enable their easy transportation. By 1949, the Britvic brand had been fully launched, and the company continued to grow.

Britvic later went on to purchase several other soft-drink businesses. The company acquired the U.K. bottling rights for the American brands of Pepsi and for 7Up, followed by full acquisition of the Robinsons and Purdeys brands in the 1990s. Britvic acquired the Tango brand in 1987, and launched its J20 brand in 1998, followed by the Fruit Shoot brand in 2000 which fast became the U.K.'s No. 1 drink for kids. The J20 brand initially came in three flavors. It is now available in six different varieties. The product was originally developed for sale in restaurants and pubs, but it has since been rolled out into supermarkets and other retail outlets. Seven bottles of J20 are sold every second, and it is the best-selling packaged drink in U.K. pubs and bars.

Britvic has continued to innovate in terms of its products. In 2005, the total soft-drink volume supplied by the company reached 1.4 billion liters. The firm has around 4,000 customers in 200,000 locations in 50 countries, and more soft-drink brands in its portfolio than any other British manufacturer. Major supermarkets, local shops, restaurants, pubs, hotels, and cinemas are among its customers.

Britvic faced a significant challenge when it floated on the U.K. stock market in 2005, issuing two profit warnings in its first year, largely as a result of health-conscious consumers cutting back on their purchases of fizzy drinks, such as Tango. The business immediately fought back by launching drench, Pennine Spring, and Fruit Shoot H20 to tap into the U.K.'s growing bottled water market. Even so, the company's major success story was

(and is) the J20 brand, which has outperformed many of the other drinks in the still drinks (noncarbonated beverage) market and Robinsons, which remains the U.K's leading squash brand.

Despite its initial challenging start at flotation, Britvic remains the second-biggest drink manufacturer in Britain, behind the Coca-Cola Company, and continues to grow as a business. By the middle of 2008, it had improved its position markedly, and its revenues were up 30 percent over the same period in 2007. However, this included a revenue contribution from the company's newly acquired subsidiary Britvic Ireland. Britvic recognized that traditional fizzy drinks were declining in popularity, but that energy drinks, such as Gatorade, which Britvic holds the bottling rights to until 2026, were becoming more popular. The company's British and international revenues were up, its growth in the British still drinks market had risen by nearly 8 percent, along with its market share of carbonated drinks. In addition, Britvic International, the subsidiary that distributes the company's products overseas, saw a huge increase. Pepsi products were also selling well. Meanwhile, J20 had established itself as the number-one packaged adult soft drink. In the first five years of its production, it generated more than $550 million for Britvic.

Apart from the products that the Britvic produces under Exclusive Bottling Agreements (EBA) with PepsiCo, such as Pepsi and 7Up and Gatorade, the company has also launched a number of its own products and re-launched brands that it acquired over the years. A prime example is Amé, a premium adult soft drink that's name means "gentle rain" in Japanese. The product, which was originally created by a company called Orchid Drinks, is a mixture of fruit juices, spring water, and herbal extracts. Its packaging is distinctive and contemporary. Britvic acquired Orchid Drinks in 2000. Idris is another example of a brand acquired by Britvic. Idris was originally founded in 1873, and Britvic purchased the brand in 1987. It is a well-known ginger beer brand.

One of Britvic's most famous acquisitions is R Whites. R Whites was founded in 1845 when homemade lemonade and ginger beer were sold by Robert and Mary White from a barrow in London. The company rapidly grew, and by the end of the

19th century had sixteen depots and five production units. It later merged with Canada Dry U.K., forming Canada Dry Rawlings Ltd. in 1980. Britvic purchased Canada Dry Rawlings Ltd. in 1986.

In order to support its brands, Britvic invests significantly in marketing campaigns including television adverts. The U.K.'s leading squash brand, Robinsons, has a long history with All England Lawn Tennis Championships, better known to consumers as Wimbledon. In 2008 the brand ran it's annual Wimbledon on-pack promotion giving 10 lucky families the chance to win an all expenses paid trip to see their favorite tennis stars at the tournament, where Robinsons is the 'Official Soft Drink.' Television advertising also supported the brand during the summer with the introduction of the Taste Buddies—seven cheeky, mischievous and endearing cartoon characters designed to delight both children and adults, and highlight the great taste of Robinsons. As a result of the summer marketing campaign, 1.5 million extra households bought Robinsons squash, resulting in a 5 percent increase in value growth for the whole squash category. The campaign further cemented Robinsons position as the U.K.'s No.1 squash representing 43 percent of the total value of the squash market.

Pepsi Max Kicks was another summer promotion run by Britvic, continuing Pepsi's close association with football. The $13 million campaign that brought together the best football players in the world and offered Pepsi Max consumers the chance to win the equivalent of more than $1,700 every 90 minutes. Other prizes included a visit to Los Angeles with David Beckham and a chance to visit Barcelona with the French international football striker, Thierry Henry. Other major football names linked to the promotion included Frank Lampard and Ronaldinho. The campaign helped Pepsi to achieve its highest market share for 5 years at 24 percent and remain the fastest growing cola in the take-home channel and the No.1 draught cola in U.K. pubs and bars.

Peter Kirkby, Britvic's brand director of carbonated beverages, said: "Together, Pepsi and Britvic's expertise at driving cola sales around football is unsurpassed. Our campaigns stand out from the crowd, and Pepsi Max Kicks is no exception, being bigger and better than ever. It will be instrumental in uniting football fans throughout the summer and exciting U.K. consumers, while providing retailers with an opportunity to maximize sales and profits during this crucial time of the year."

The marketing director at PepsiCo, Bruno Gruwez, saw the initiative as being one of a number of exciting and unique campaigns that allowed consumers to link up with their favorite football stars. One of the key differences was allowing consumers to determine the look of the advertisements and the activities of the footballers in those adverts. The promotion was supported by point-of-sale material and in-store displays.

Not content with supporting only J20 and the Pepsi Max brands, Britvic embarked upon a major initiative to promote its bottled water product, drench. Britvic chose the puppet character "Brains" from the iconic British television series Thunderbirds to spearhead its attempts to raise brand awareness among consumers. The campaign, launched in June 2008, saw a tenfold increase in consumer awareness of drench in just two weeks. The ad was seen by two million people on YouTube, making it the most viewed comedy video on the site. The ad was also featured on the social networking site Facebook. The sales of drench increased by 172 percent following the campaign, and the major supermarket chains of Tesco, ASDA Waitrose, Morrison's, and Somerfield soon began stocking the product.

Britvic's senior brand manager for drench, Cameron Davidson said: "The success of the new drench Brains ad has been phenomenal. The bottled water market is hugely competitive, but a bit dull! Drench is successfully livening up the category and generating consumer engagement, particularly in the grocery channel, where it is hard to differentiate between provenance-focused brands. So we knew drench, as a relative newcomer, had to do something big and bold to get talked about and into shopping baskets. So far results suggest we are achieving this. The ad campaign has really created a buzz around the brand, and we are seeing this reflected in sales—drench has made a significant impact on the grocery water market, which is a real achievement, but we've also seen benefits in the convenience and impulse channel where drench started its journey when it was launched in 2005. In the next year we are looking to build on the momentum drench has gained through further marketing investment as well as innovation. To maintain taxability across the summer months, we will be launching a consumer PR campaign, which will focus on the brand's key message of mental hydration."

The next phase of the drench Brains campaign, known as the "Brain Gym," was rolled out in July 2008. "The Brains ad was a great success, boosting both sales and general awareness of drench," said Davidson. "We wanted to do something to keep up the momentum around the brand and communicate to consumers the importance of mental hydration in a fun and entertaining way. The Brain Gym is a perfect way to do this and is a great fit with the personality of the brand."

In response to consumer demands for more natural products, that is, products with no sweeteners, preservatives, or artificial colors, a new formulation of PepsiCo's Gatorade was launched by Britvic in May 2008. Britain was the first global market in which the new formula was released. As well as the new formulation, the bottle was redesigned so that it can ergonomi-cally fit into people's hands while they are exercising.

Via a fast moving and competitive series of campaigns in various markets, Britvic and its partners continue to try to innovate so as to drive the company's brands forward. Their goal is not simply to retain market share but to increase it, as well as grow consumer awareness of its brands. By doing so, Britvic has not only been able to improve its fortunes and expand internationally, but once again take its place as one of the leading soft drinks manufacturers in the world.

Questions for Discussion

1. Choose one of the Britvic's brands: What are the core, actual, and augmented product benefits of the brand?

2. What are the sources of brand equity for any given Britvic brand?

3. What marketing targeting and positioning would you recommend for a selected Britvic brand?

Sources: Quotes and other information from Britvic (www.britvic.com); Talking Retail (www.talkingretail.com); Pepsi (www.pepsi.co.uk); and drench (www.drenchwater.co.uk).

Defining Marketing and the Marketing Process

Chapter 9 UneteR,cmc!in9the MarketplaceandConsumers (Chapters¿

Pari 3 Designing a Customer-Driven Strategy and Mix (Chapters 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17)

Port 4 Extending Marketing (Chapters 18,19,20)

New-Product Development and Product Life-Cycle Strategies

Chapter PREVIEW

In the previous chapter, you learned how marketers manage and develop products and brands. In this chapter, we'll look into two additional product topics: developing new products and managing products through their life cycles. New products are the lifeblood of an organization. However, new-product development is risky, and many new products fail. So, the first part of this chapter lays out a process for finding and growing successful new products. Once introduced, marketers want their products to enjoy long and happy lives. In the second part of the chapter, you'll see that every product passes through several life-cycle stages and that each stage poses new challenges requiring different marketing strategies and tactics. Finally, we'll wrap up our product discussion by looking at two additional considerations, social responsibility in product decisions and international product and services marketing.

For openers, consider Apple Computer. More than two decades ago, as an early new-product innovator, Apple got off to a fast and impressive start. But only a decade later, as its creative fires cooled, Apple found itself on the brink of extinction. That set the stage for one of the most remarkable turnarounds in corporate history. Read on to see how Apple's cofounder, Steve Jobs, used lots of innovation and creative new products to first start the company and then to remake it again 20 years later.

From the very start, the tale of Apple is a tale of dazzling creativity and customer-driven innovation. Under the leadership of its cofounder and creative genius, Steve Jobs, Apple's very first personal computers, introduced in the late 1970s, stood apart because of their user-friendly look and feel. The company's Macintosh computer, unveiled in 1984, and its LazerWriter printers blazed new trails in desktop computing and publishing, making Apple an early industry leader in both innovation and market share.

But then things took an ugly turn for Apple. In 1985, after tumultuous struggles with the new president he'd hired only a year earlier, Steve Jobs left Apple. With Jobs gone, Apple's creative fires cooled. By the late 1980s, the company's fortunes dwindled as a new wave of PC machines, sporting Intel chips and Microsoft software, swept the market. By the mid- to late-1990s, Apple's sales had plunged to $5 billion, 50 percent off previous highs. And its once-commanding share of the Dersonal-computer market had dropped to a tiny 2 percent. Even the most ardent Apple fans—the "MacHeads"—wavered, and the company's days seemed numbered.

Yet Apple has engineered a remarkable turnaround. Last year's sales soared to a record $24 billion, almost triple the sales just three years earlier. Profits rose a stunning 13-fold in that same three-year period. "To say Apple Computer is hot just doesn't do the company justice," said one analyst. "Apple is smoking, searing, blisteringly hot, not to mention hip, with a side order of funky. . . . Gadget geeks around the world have crowned Apple the keeper of all things cool."

designed specifically for cruising the Internet (hence the "i" in "iMac"). The dramatic

designed specifically for cruising the Internet (hence the "i" in "iMac"). The dramatic

What caused this breathtaking turnaround? Apple rediscovered the magic that had made the company so successful in the first place: customer-driven creativity and new-product innovation. The remarkable makeover began with the return of Steve Jobs in 1997. Since leaving Apple, Jobs had started a new computer company, NeXT. He'd then bought out Pixar Animation Studios, turning it into an entertainment-industry powerhouse. Jobs returned to Apple determined to breathe new creative life and customer focus into the company he'd cofounded 20 years earlier.

Jobs' first task was to revitalize Apple's computer business. For starters, in 1998 Apple launched the iMac personal computer, which featured a sleek, egg-shaped monitor and hard drive, all in one unit, in a futuristic translucent turquoise casing. With its one-button Internet access, this machine was

"Apple is smoking, searing, blisteringly hot, not to mention hip, with a side order of funky—it's the keeper of all things cool."

iMac won raves for design and lured buyers in droves. Within a year, it had sold more than a million units.

Jobs next unleashed Mac OS X, a ground-breaking new Apple operating system that one observer called "the equivalent of a cross between a Porsche and an Abram's tank." OS X served as the launching pad for a new generation of Apple computers and software products. Consider iLife, a bundle of lifestyle applications that comes with every new Mac. It includes applications such as iMovie (for video editing), iDVD (for recording movies, digital-photo slide shows, and music onto TV-playable DVDs), iPhoto (for managing and touching up digital pictures), GarageBand (for making and mixing your own music), iWeb (for creating Web sites and blogs and getting them online), and iWork (for making presentations and newsletters).

The iMac and Mac OS X put Apple back on the map in personal computing. But Jobs knew that Apple, still a nicher claiming just a 6 percent share of the U.S. market, for example, would never catch up in computers with dominant competitors such as Dell and HP. Real growth and stardom would require even more creative thinking. And it just doesn't get much more creative than iPod and iTunes, innovations that would utterly change the way people acquire and listen to music.

A music buff himself, Jobs noticed that kids by the millions were using computers and CD writers to download digital songs from then-illegal online services such as Napster, and then burning their own music CDs. He moved quickly to make CD burners standard equipment on all Macs. Then, to help users download music and manage their music databases, Apple's programmers created state-of-the-art jukebox software called iTunes.

Even before iTunes hit the streets, according to Apple watcher Brent Schendler, Jobs "recognized that although storing and playing music on your computer was pretty cool, wouldn't it be even cooler if there was a portable, Walkman-type player that could hold all your digital music so that you could listen to it anywhere?" Less than nine months later, Apple introduced the sleek and sexy iPod. In another 18 months, the Apple iTunes Music Store opened on the Web, enabling consumers to legally download CDs and individual songs.

The results, of course, have been astonishing. The iPod now ranks as one of the greatest consumer electronics hits of all time. By March of 2008, Apple had sold more than 119 million iPods, and more than four billion songs had been downloaded from the iTunes Store. "We had hoped to sell a million songs in the first six months, but we did that in the first six days," notes an Apple spokesman. The iPod captures more than 70 percent of the music player market; and Apple's iTunes Store is currently the number-two music store— online or offline—in the world (Wal-Mart is number one).

Apple's success is attracting a horde of large, resourceful competitors. To stay ahead, the company must keep its eye on the consumer and continue to

Apple's cofounder, Steve Jobs, used lots of innovation and creative new products to first start the company and then to remake it again 20 years later.

innovate. So, Apple isn't standing still. Following the debut of its incredibly popular iPhone, Apple has introduced movie rentals via iTunes, which can be

Through dazzling creativity and customer-driven new-product innovation, Apple has engineered a remarkable turnaround in recent years. At Apple, innovation is a way of life.

watched on an iPod, iPhone, PC, or via Apple TV; MacBook Air, the world's thinnest notebook computer; and Time Capsule, an appliance that automatically and wirelessly backs up everything on your Mac. Apple has also opened more than 200 chic and gleaming Apple Stores, now the world's fastest-growing retail chain. And observers see a host of new products just on or just over the horizon, such as iHome (a magical device that powers all your digital home entertainment devices) and an iPod on Wheels (a digital hub that integrates your iPod with your car's entertainment system).

For the third straight year, Apple was named the world's most innovative company in Boston Consulting Group's "Most Innovative Company" survey of 2,500 senior executives worldwide. Apple received an amazing 25 percent of the votes, twice the number of runner-up 3M and three times that of third-place Microsoft. The innovative company also topped the most recent Fortune magazine list of America's most admired companies.

Thus, almost overnight, it seems, Steve Jobs has transformed Apple from a failing niche computer maker to a major force in consumer electronics, digital music and video, and who knows what else in the future. And he's done it through innovation—by helping those around him to "Think Different" (Apple's motto) in their quest to bring value to customers. Fortune sums it up this way: "Apple has demonstrated how to create real, breathtaking growth by dreaming up products so new and ingenious that they have upended one industry after another. Jobs' utter dedication to discovery and excellence has created a culture that has made Apple a symbol of innovation. There, innovation is a way of life."1

Continue reading here: Many Marketers Are Now Using New Simulated Marketing Technologies Such As Frito-lay S Online Virtual Convenience Store To Reduce The Cost Of

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