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India is one huge developing market, and one of our primary markets as well. However, marketing our Spanish Extra Virgin Olive Oil was one big challenge. Indians are traditionally attached to cooking with ghee (100% milk fat, often made in the homes for self consumption) or even butter (home made butter is still a tradition in many families). Immediately followed together with a wide use of refined oils. Sun flower refined oil probably is the largest followed by refine mustard oils, coconut oils and even refined rice oil. These are widely manufactured in India itself and therefore, its availability and popularity tops the charts. Since the last decade, there has been imports of refined palm oils, canola oils, refined olive oils and even refined pomace oil; which is often marketed as refined pomace olive oil and leads the segment because of its cheap prices, at times even cheaper than the home grown & manufactured refined oils.

We designed our theme 'Living healthy' and supported it with a series of online advertising materials both with print and videos

Considering the various health benefits of our Spanish Extra Virgin Olive Oil, we designed our advertising strategy in order to educate our consumers on various different levels, starting with sharing some insights on what is extra virgin olive oil

We further studied the Indian markets and the various categories of olive oils which were widely made available and upon finding out that many consumers seemed confused between choosing extra virgin olive oil, with refined olive oils, and pure olive oils or even worst refined pomace oils, we therefore, designed some videos sharing some insights on this subject

Having shared some basic insights on the health benefits of extra virgin olive oils and especially the authenticity of Spanish extra Virgin Olive Oils, we wanted to further enhance our say with someone professional, in order to carry our message on our consumers highlighting primarily on the health especially because Indians are known to out number statistics on hyper-tension and cholesterol related diseases. We approached Ms. Bipasha Das, consultant dietician M.Sc. (community nutrition and dietetics management) and shared our product attributes and we were thrilled when she willingly endorsed our brand

Now we have shared insights on our Hagardhs Spanish Extra Virgin Olive Oil, we have shared insights on its health benefits and we even have a professional personality who has endorsed us, what could we do next, in order to have an edge to our strategy?

We went to our consumers, and we met those who were willing to listen to us and be willing to try our product and upon their acceptance of our quality product, we asked if they would be willing to endorse our brand as well.

We were extremely thrilled to get a great response from other professionals such as teachers, interior-designers and the like

Having succeeded on these, we further went ahead and met with other consumers from different cities, states, cultures and religions and we went ahead and designed a local advertising, in local languages which was exclusively targeted to the wider Indian consumers in their own languages

Along with our video ads, we also designed several print ads, which carried our theme on Living healthy, and the health benefits of using our Spanish Extra Virgin Olive Oil

We are the first brand in India, to have an advertising strategy which educates the consumers on the health benefits of using Spanish Extra Virgin Olive Oil. We had ten different messages and these were endorsed by both Indian consumers and even some of our European consumers too

Our goal was to reach a wider group of our consumers with our message and at the same time, give them a feel good feeling with our ads as well, hence, we asked our consumers to endorse our brands instead

We sampled our products at the retail, thats where we made friends with our consumers and asked them if they would be willing to first understand all about our Spanish Extra Virgin Olive Oil and its health benefits and then, use our product and ONLY if they feel good about our brand, they could endorse too. And to our surprise, we made friends with many

To further drive our theme on Living healthy, we came up with several print ads which can be seen on the Facebook page. We developed these ads together with some of those consumers or their family and friends who were happy using our products and were willing to endorse those You may also see the Facebook of Hagardhs to get a much detailed view of these.

Please click here

Our research showed us that some consumers were concerned on using extra virgin olive oil for cooking Indian cuisine, especially because, of the confused belief that the smoke point (In cooking, the smoke point of an oil or fat is the temperature at which, under defined conditions, enough volatile compounds emerge from the oil that a bluish smoke becomes clearly visible. At this temperature, volatile compounds, such as water, free fatty acids, and short-chain degradation products of oxidation come up from the oil. The smoke point is the temperature at which the oil is decomposed and where possibly toxicological relevant compounds are formed) of extra virgin olive oil is around 191C as compared to their widely used refined sun flower oil which is around 238C.

We asked a question to our consumers, at what temperature do we cook or boil eggs (100C)? What is the highest temperature a pressure-cooker (which is widely used for Indian cookings) can reach(130C)? What is the highest temperature in which most or all the Indian food is cooked(between 100C to 130C)? So why is Extra Virgin Olive Oil, which has a smoke point of 191C considered doubtful? We even asked them, how come, if something can be consumed raw with salads, cannot be used for cooking? All those consumers we spoke to, found their answers in our questions. And this inspired us to design some more print ads

We went ahead to develop some more videos for our online campaign, in order to develop a feel good feeling for our consumers. Our ads are simple, yet elegant, and carry a candid message alongwith.

Our goal was to keep our costs low, so that was a challenge to work with. But thankfully, our agency came up with some great ideas for a video for our extra virgin olive oil

We used a very similar idea for our Bordeaux French Chateau wines as well

However, when we wanted to use a similar idea for our Italian pasta and pasta sauces, we had to struggle through a few brainstorming sessions, before we can came up with this

By now, we were confident and so was our agency, having produced few videos with squeezed budgets and yet clearly supporting our gaol. We wanted to try out something different, yet, inspired by our theme, for our coffee ads. And we surprised us once again with great works of creative arts

We defined our advertising goals clearly, first ads would carry the fine elements of our product attributes, followed by consumer feeds of our products straight from our consumers, without who, we would never spell our success in the markets we worked

We therefore, applied a similar strategy for our Traditional Cheese videos

And even with our Dark Chocolates too

We were keen to apply our advertising strategy for European markets and, we were delighted when Ms. Kubra, a dietician from The Netherlands was willing to endorse our Spanish Extra Virgin Olive Oil. We develop a Dutch video ad sub-titled in English. We will be using a similar theme for other European countries as well