NEW PRODUCTS: Foster's mineral water

Foster's mineral water launched in AP:

SABMiller has launched packaged mineral water and soda under its beer brand Foster's, in the Andhra Pradesh market. The Company now seeing mineral water and soda as a core business segment, unlike earlier when it was surrogate brand for them. Andhra Pradesh is a second largest market after Tamil Nadu in the segment. The products, which were available in 10 other States since 2007, are priced at Rs 15/litre of mineral water and Rs 10/500 ml of soda in Andhra Pradesh, SKOL currently operates 10 bottling plants across the country and they are planning to set up five more plants in Orissa, Goa, New Delhi and Chennai over the next four months. The company aims to sell at least 60,000 cases a month in the State.

FMCG INDUSTRY2011

Spate of price hikes spells good fortune for FMCG industry

FMCG players seem to be regaining their pricing power, with Hindustan Unilever taking price increases of 5-8 per cent in soaps and detergents, Dabur India hiking prices by 3-4 per cent and Britannia Industries 5-10 per cent on select brands of biscuits over the past six months.

After dealing with rampant inflation, bruising competition and parsimonious consumers in 2009 and 2010, listed players in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) segment can now look forward to an easier year ahead.

A 20 per cent increase in Corporate India's wage bill, strong hiring plans and a good monsoon may put consumers in a mood to spend more lavishly on FMCGs this year.

Rural, wage push to demand

As escalating food prices took a bite out of the consumer wallet for much of 2009 and 2010, leading FMCG companies were forced to cut selling prices in categories such as detergents, hair oils and biscuits to drive volume growth.

FMCG behemoth Hindustan Unilever closed 2009-10 with a decline in its sales, while the top line for the 12 leading listed players crept up only by 2 per cent.

Demand rebound

However, demand for FMCGs appears to be on the rebound in recent months.

For one, with food price inflation subsiding from a peak, consumers are beginning to again experiment with ‘aspirational' products, pushing up sales for skin care products, health supplements and processed foods in the recent September quarter.

Two, the good monsoon and a rebound in agricultural output is helping rural demand for the bread-and-butter FMCGs such as soaps and shampoos.

Players such as Dabur India note that rural sales of shampoos and toothpastes grew at higher rates than urban sales in the April-September period. Colgate Palmolive, Hindustan Unilever and Dabur, who derive over half of their sales from rural India, may be the key beneficiaries of this.

Sales growth for the listed FMCG companies thus averaged a reasonable 10 per cent in the first half of 2010-11, aided mainly by better sales volumes.

What could also keep the higher FMCG demand going is the fact that Corporate India is back to handing out handsome wage hikes.

For the first six months of 2010-11, the combined wage bill of the listed BSE 500 companies shot up by 20 per cent, putting an additional Rs 17,000 crore in the hands of its workforce.

This income buoyancy seems to be allowing FMCG makers greater freedom to pass on rising input costs to their consumers.

In fact, with input costs rising, soap and detergent selling prices have already been pegged up by 5-6 per cent, coconut or hair oils have seen prices rise by 10-13 per cent, and biscuits by 5-10 per cent in the last six months.

Twitter: For Marketing

Ultimate Guide For Twitter Marketing:

Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that has seen massive growth over the last two years and it can be a boon to any online marketing strategy.

The site allows users to post short messages to all other users that subscribe to their feed, or in Twitter-speak, their “followers”. Messages, or “tweets” have a maximum of 140 characters so updates are quick and to the point on Twitter.

With a little maintenance and promotion, a company can use a Twitter account to reach thousands of people every day for very low costs. The service is free and only requires one or two people to maintain any given account. Below are some suggestions on how to use Twitter as part of your overall online marketing strategy.

Strengthen your brand
Using Twitter to talk about your company in an interesting and entertaining way can strengthen your overall brand. By giving your company a personality, you can make your company seem more accessible and friendly. Giving real-time office updates, giving inside information and telling relevant (and tasteful) jokes can go a long way. Make sure to avoid making all your tweets into advertisements, as this will surely turn people off.

Inform people of new products and services of your company
Lots of news actually breaks on Twitter. On many stories the Twitter community was talking about it before the mainstream media. You can do a little news-breaking of your own company by announcing new products and services that your company is offering.

Link to your website, blog or press releases
Twitter allows you to add links to your tweets, so if you have a good number of followers, you can expect a certain number of people to go to your website when you tweet about it and provide a link. This can be a powerful way to drive traffic and increase your company’s exposure.

Weigh in on conversations others have about your company
Using Twitter Search, you can search for your company’s name or your employee’s names. It will return all the tweets in which people mention the terms you search for. This is a great way to seek feedback on your product without putting out a formal survey. You will know what people think about what your company does, and you may find out interesting information that you didn’t already know.

Engage with people talking about your field
You can also use Twitter Search to find out what people are saying about things related to your products or services. If you work for Geezeo.com, for example, you could see what everyone is saying about Mint.com or Wesabe.com, all sites that offer online financial management.

Promote events
If your company is throwing an event or attending a conference, you can tweet about it to generate interest in the event. You may be able to rally a few more people to attend, and you may be able to find other Twitterers at the event. This kind of pre-networking can add value to the relationships you then create in person.

Provide customer support
Many companies, often provide customer support over Twitter. If your company’s clients are particularly tech-savvy, it is likely that many of them are on Twitter. By encouraging them to ask questions over Twitter, you can provide quick customer support to people in yet another medium. This adds to your company’s brand as it makes you look more accessible and more helpful.

Inform communities when other communication streams fail
If you ever need to alert people of something about your company and your other methods of communication are shut down, you can use Twitter. Though Twitter has struggled with up-time issues in the past, it seems to be doing better lately, and is now very reliable tool for communicating with customers if your main site or email server is down.