We want to be more relevant to youth: Mansoor Ali

On the way of transformation towards becoming youth centric brand, Hamdard Laboratories India, the parent company of iconic beverage brand RoohAfza, has launched RoohAfza Fusion. It is a combination of RoohAfza with pure fruit juice. The brand concept comes from the herbal roots of RoohAfza which has cooling power of 10 herbs. This youth oriented product is available in five flavors namely lemon, orange, mango, pineapple, orange and litchi. 

What are your observations of the Indian fruit juice market that led you to launch RoohAfza Fusion?

When we started evaluating the brand two years back there were two to three issues that were to be addressed- the brand needs to be more relevant to youth as today’s youth is looking more of convenience and aspiration based products. The health conscious Indian people are moving away from carbonated drinks, they are getting more into natural stuff. This prompted us to shortlist the juice category. We also wanted to be more relevant to youth in the convenient format where the growth is huge and massive. We saw that juice is a very ideal thing to do because juice and fruit combination is very complementary. Then whole idea of developing RoohAfza Fusion started. We did the test launch in Delhi and UP in September where we got good results. We launched it in 30,000 outlets where we saw a very good off-take. We also got a lot of feedback from the consumers and then finally we launched the product here in Mumbai.

Why you thought of expansion to Fusion avatar while keeping traditional identity of RoohAfza?

To expand RoohAfza my reason is very different, I need new consumers. I am competing with people who are doing lime or orange juice. I might go in the market and compete with all the tetra packs but when you look at the positioning of the RoohAfza products it’s entirely different.

How different is this Fusion version from the traditional RoohAfza?

RoohAfza brand itself is a unique brand and there is no brand or product similar to RoohAfza. There might be a lot of quashes in the market similar to us but RoohAfza is a category of its own. We are doing a unique combination of RoohAfza with the fruit juice hence this product is mixed with fruit juice. The product is only available in 200ml tetra pack. It’s a trial pack. RoohAfza brand has given a lot of strength to this brand. Fusion will continue to grow more variants and go into more states etc. Also, we are simultaneously working on expansion of all our other categories too.

What is your marketing strategy?

We get the tetra pack manufactured from the external facility. We buy the finest juices for this from multinationals. We want to sale around 6-7 million units this year. It’s a baby right now so we don’t want to just push volumes because it’s a very short shelf life product. We want to create a right perception in the market with the trade channel and the consumer. So, for one and half year it will be brand building investment. We will start getting ROI in a year or two from now.

What will be the retail presence of the brand initially?

Initially, we are looking for the retail presence of the brand at 70-75000 multi brand outlets in the country while targeting the age group between 8 to 21 years of young boys and girls.

When are you planning to launch your own eCommerce portal?

We are planning to launch our own eCommerce portal hopefully within this financial year. We have recently developed and revamped our website. We are there on all other marketplaces as well.

What is Hamdard’s revenue and by what percentage it is growing YOY?

The revenue is in double digit since last many years. We want to continue growing in double digits in the phase of slow and slugging industry growth.

What are your expansion plans of Hamdard Wellness stores?

We have six Hamdard wellness stores across Delhi, Patna and Hyderabad and this year again we are planning to launch six more stores with an investment of Rs 70-80 lakhs. These all will be the company owned stores.