Aditya Shome is the executive director of Marico Bangladesh Limited (MBL) who has to chart the firm’s future strategy. MBL, whose parent company Marico is based in India, oversaw the rapid rise of the Parachute brand of coconut oil in Bangladesh. Within a decade of introduction to the Bangladesh market, the brand had risen to the status of the #1 consumer brand beating long established multinational brands like Nokia, and Sunsilk and local behemoth Grameen bank.

Even as Parachute oil is the clear brand leader in the branded regular coconut oil market, having rapidly taken away share from the loose oil market, there is a threat emerging. The fastest growing segment in this category is the Value Added Hair Oil (VAHO) market which is further divided into four sub-segments – perfumed, cooling, Coconut Oil + and non-coconut oil. In each of these four categories, Marico’s offerings are laggards.

Not only are their shares a lot lower than the individual brand leaders in these four categories, some of these brands are actually directly comparing themselves (in television advertisements) to the flagship Parachute coconut oil brand. Shome thus has to balance maintenance of the leading position in the coconut oil market, to minimise cannibalisation in promoting the various VAHO offerings of Marico, and to gain on the leaders in these other categories.

At Kobe, Leong and her team provided end-to-end influencer marketing services for clients including consultation on marketing strategies for realising brand objectives, assisting clients in identifying KPIs, execution and monitoring of campaigns, analysis of campaign results and providing recommendations. In addition, Kobe’s AI driven influencer platform allowed clients to choose the most suitable influencers from a database of over 5000 influencers.

Millennials in Singapore were social media savvy and often-brought products based on recommendations of influencers they trusted. Targeting this customer segment through social media was therefore a viable option. However, the Jia Jia campaign had a few limitations including a small budget and a short timeframe. Another constraint was that herbal tea was not popular with millennials.

Historically Chinese herbal tea was synonymous with Singapore’s culture and dated back to its history as a British settlement. However, over the past decade, bubble tea had become the preferred drink of the millennials. Leong knew she was being ambitious in trying to “sell bell-bottoms to Millennials”, and she wondered if her influencer marketing campaign to rebrand Jia Jia herbal tea in Singapore could be as successful as the Levi’s Jeans’ 501 campaign. Could Leong turn the clock back and make Jia Jia the most talked about beverage brand in Singapore?