Case Study: How Nu-Shakti raised category awareness to enter Chennai market

Nu-Shakti leveraged mom groups, influencers and offline activations to raise awareness about food fortification to launch products in Chennai.

As a part of launching products in the Chennai market, Nu-Shakti initiated conversations on food fortification among mothers with the help of micro-communities, WhatsApp groups, Facebook Live sessions and other initiatives. Nu-Shakti also roped in actor Ramya Krishnan to be the face of the efforts, across platforms, with an intent to reach potential consumers in the Chennai market.

Category Introduction

Nutritional deficiencies are high in India, with women and children the most affected. According to the National Family Health Survey, more than 50% of Indians eat an unbalanced diet. The pattern of daily food consumption has remained the same since 2005 – among both women and men. Also, reports highlight that anaemia due to micronutrient deficiency is a major public health concern and a great silent epidemic. Around 45-50% of children and women in India are anaemic. 

This is perpetuated due to the lack of awareness and understanding of various micronutrients. The availability of affordable nutritious products designed to counter malnutrition remains limited. Addressing and assessing the severity of this issue required an approach targeting local food habits and behaviour. In this scenario, home fortification is one of the safest, most effective and affordable tools to enhance the nutritional value of staple foods for every household.

Brand Introduction 

A brand of Royal DSM, Nu-Shakti has been designed to support better nutrition across India by increasing the power (Shakti) of everyday foods. The brand offers a range of daily home fortifiers formulated with essential vitamins and minerals to meet the nutritional needs of urban and rural consumers seeking healthier lifestyles.

Nu-Shakti’s product offerings include Powermix for Rice (fortified rice kernel), Powermix for Atta (atta/flour fortifier), and MixMe (fortified orange-flavoured beverage mix). Brand's products offer nutritious, locally-relevant options enriched with essential nutrients and vitamins to overcome nutrition deficiencies seamlessly and conveniently. The benefit for consumers – these are easy to use with no change in dietary habits, taste or appearance of foods. 

Summary

Nu-Shakti launched a campaign integrating both offline and online channels to introduce the brand as an affordable avenue of adding nutrition in daily meals. Through this campaign, the brand is driving awareness about the need for micronutrients in the daily diets of people, enabled via home food fortification. The campaign connects with its core audience, the family’s decision-maker — the mother.

Objective 

The launch campaign aimed at creating awareness among consumers about making informed choices regarding their dietary habits while simultaneously providing them with an affordable and accessible option. The objective of the brand was to play a positive role in the country’s nutrition discourse. 

Brief

• Generate awareness about the launch of Nu-Shakti, its products and benefits.
• Educate consumers about the need for various micronutrients and the concept of home fortification in filling the gap.

Creative Idea 

As a marketing strategy, the brand planned the awareness campaign for Nu-Shakti products and micronutrient requirements in five different ways.

Challenges

Since the concept of home food fortification is new to the Indian market, the biggest challenge lay in ensuring mothers developed trust in the brand as well as understood the concept and importance of adding nutrition to regular meals. 

Execution

The multi-phased launch plan leveraged offline-online integration. Consumers across the platform were educated about the concept of home food fortification and trained to foster brand advocacy. The brand entered households via the family’s decision-maker – the mother. 

Truism/insight: Children don’t eat vegetables and compromise on their nutritional intake. Aware of this, mothers are constantly devising ways of adding extra nutrition in their child’s meals/snacks. 

Solution: Empowering mothers with the message: “Making everyday meals more powerful”. A first not only for consumers but for nutritional categories too, the campaign reassured the mother about her ability to provide nutrition via simple products that could be incorporated in staples such as rice and atta. With Nu-Shakti, these staple foods don’t change in taste or look while children receive extra nutrition without even knowing it. This secret trick gives a mother the ability to manage the nutritional intake of her child and family. While launching their daily food fortifiers in Tamil Nadu, the brand utilised the power of maternal awareness in engaging and educating the mother’s community about food fortification.

1. Door-door campaign with 100+ Chennai women spreading nutritional awareness: A team of 100+ women convincing other women and mothers about eating proper meals. The team explained every nuance of proper consumption habits as well as the need for a nutritious diet for women hailing from diverse strata of society and their families.
2. Encourage trials: The initiatives include house-to-house and in-store sampling.
3. School Activation – designating students as the ‘Nutrition Police’: Engaging with students of 100-plus schools in Tamil Nadu for understanding their nutrition levels and increasing awareness on the requirement by a gamification process. 
4. Building Trust: Popular actress and supermom Ramya Krishnan came on board as our brand ambassador, educating consumers about Nu-Shakti products through TV and print as well as digital formats. We expanded the conversation further by designing a peer to peer awareness model for micro- and nano-influencers from the community. 
5. Driving Conversations: Multiple experts, especially nutritionists and chefs, were co-opted to spread the brand messaging about building the ‘power of everyday food’. An Army of Moms (mom influencers), and Kids Nutrition Police (school outreach program) augmented the discussion. 

Also Read: How Merries entered India via new mom groups

Timelines

• September 2019: Mega launch meeting engaging mothers community from Chennai.
• November 2019: On Iron Deficiency Day, a meet was conducted with Chennai mothers to make them aware of the deficiency and how to overcome it using food fortifiers.
• December 2019: Engaged with 60-plus nutritionists from Chennai, educating them about the products and their value proposition in improving nutritional levels of daily meals.
• January 2020: On the auspicious occasion of Pongal, mothers were invited to celebrate this festival and take a pledge: #WePledgeforRightNutrition. Besides experts on nutrition, celebrity chef Suresh Chinnaswamy was invited to make festive dishes using brand products. This was digitally amplified via all social media handles. Furthermore, a panel discussion was held with eminent nutritionists from Chennai.

For each meeting, the influencer mothers used their social network to spread the brand message to online cohorts. This was done via pre-buzz posts on Facebook and Instagram, FB Live during events and post-event pics and videos. Meanwhile, bloggers curated content after attending the meetings.

In further engaging the online mother’s community, the following touchpoints were activated:

• FB Live: Interactive live sessions with experts educating women about nutrition deficiency
• Closed & Open Micro-Community Program: Initiated conversations on food fortification and the brand in 45 closed and open micro-communities on Facebook
• WhatsApp Groups: 150 new moms recruited to seed content across 750 WhatsApp groups
• Influencer Program:
  • 50 Instagrammers with 500-2,000 followers
  • 5 Instagrammers with 10,000-20,000 followers
  • 50 Facebook influencers with 1,000 followers
  • 3 YouTubers with 30,000 subscribers

Results 

Within eight months of launch, there has been an extremely encouraging response for our products across markets, garnering awareness of 34% and an ad reach of 41%.  

Achieving significant reach of more than two million, the campaign was a huge success, generating great buzz as well as tremendous interest. The digital campaigns by Nu-Shakti – ‘By Mothers for Mothers’ and #WePledgeForCompleteNutrition – increased awareness among Chennai mothers about the importance of food fortification in providing the right nutrition for their family.

Alok Kohli, Business Director – DSM India said, “The current way of life and our food habits overlook the importance of a well-balanced diet containing adequate nutrition. Therefore, awareness of nutrient deficiencies and measures to counter it are of paramount importance for everyone – in rural as well as urban India. To meet this objective, Nu-Shakti provides innovative, affordable and accessible solutions addressing everyone’s nutritional needs, thereby enabling a better, healthier future for all families.”