Nestle sets sights on Singha's lead

Nestle Pure Life is ready to capture the leadership position in the PET bottled-water segment with the launch of its latest ‘Care Delivery’ campaign. The move reinforces its proactive ‘emotional marketing’ approach.

"We want to double our Pure Life business in Thailand in the next three to four years," Prayad Anuchiracheewa, who has overseen Nestle Thai's water business for about six months, said yesterday.

Before the water business, Prayad - who is now executive director for water - was sales director at the company for five years, overseeing all food and drink products, including Nescafe, Milo and Coffee Mate.

"My primary mission is to grow the drinking-water business by adding functional benefits to the products to provide higher health benefits, in addition to just hydration," Prayad said, adding that functional ingredients, such as collagen or fluoride, would be added to the products in the near future to enhance health benefits to individual consumers, such as beautiful skin for women or strong teeth for children.

He said Nestle was studying an investment plan to set up a second manufacturing facility for its bottled drinking water in Thailand.

"We are making a feasibility study for a potential location for our second drinking-water production plant. The move is after our first plant at Pho Sam Ton in Ayutthaya has reached its full capacity of about 200 million to 300 million bottles of drinking water per annum."

Prayad said the Nestle Pure Life business enjoyed strong growth of 49.5 per cent in the first six months of the year. He added the company expected to grow the sales of drinking water by at least 50 per cent this year.

Prayad estimated total demand for bottled drinking water to grow by between 7 and 8 per cent this year.

The market competition will focus on enhancing key branding strategy to encourage good perception by the consumers. It is in line with the growing trend of people, who have become more health-conscious and shifted their water consumption to only a few major brands they can trust in for their water quality.

Prayad said Nestle Pure Life was currently second in the Bt13-billion market for local bottled drinking water, of which almost 60 per cent is dominated by the top four brands. The other three leaders are Singha, Crystal and Nam Tip.

Singha is currently the leader with a market share of 28 to 29 per cent, followed by Nestle Pure Life with 20 per cent and Crystal with 18 to 19 per cent.

Prayad said the company was aiming "to increase market share of Nestle Pure Life by between one and 2 per cent every year, and become the market leader in the next three years".

He said it would also raise the product penetration of Nestle Pure Life, from 30 per cent of more than 200,000 local retail shops throughout the Kingdom to at least 50 per cent in the near future. He said Nestle Pure Life had successfully achieved strong penetration of more than 50 per cent in the major 20,000 restaurant outlets nationwide.

Prayad added that Nestle Pure Life was poised to emerge the market leader in the PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottled water segment with the launch of its latest 'Care Delivery' campaign in a crucial move to reinforce its proactive 'emotional marketing' approach. The campaign will run together with the roll-out of new packaging labels with additional catchy and caring messages to reach the target consumers.

He said the company was moving towards penetrating the PET bottled water market in the second half of the year. The new emotional-marketing strategy has been launched to boost awareness of Nestle Pure Life. The key marketing message will be communicated to target customers through the company's new concept entitled "Sharing is giving good things to each other'.

The company will also launch its newest 'Care Delivery' campaign to follow up on the great success of Nestle Pure Life's latest TV commercials, which have been launched since the beginning of the year and received very good feedback from consumers both in brand perception and awareness.

Kwanchai  Rungfapaisarn

The Nation