Imagine

A bowl full of maggi noodles in your hands!!! Nothing more delicious than that seems when you are feeling hungry. Few days back when I was eating maggi, a thought puzzled my mind that how an Indian consumer can be so mad for maggi, which was not at all according to the Indian food habits.

Maggi – A product of Nestle

Maggi was introduced in India in 1982. Nestle launched Maggi as ‘2 mins. Noodle’, when Indian market was devoid of such packaged food items. Maggi was launched with a concept of instant cooked food item for working women. They promoted it with a slogan ‘ Bas 2 Min.’ – “ Fast to Cook & Good to Eat” . It was in an attractive packing, affordable price and a different taste- A full pack. Later on Nestle found that their product is attracting kids more. So, they targeted on kids by promotional campaigns in schools.

Maggi positioned themselves as healthy fast foods. Maggi was a pioneer in this eating segment and reaped the advantage very well, holding a strong market share. Effective marketing strategy and other features like fast cooking, small packing, and low price helped maggi for its establishment. Credit should be given on company’s efforts for educating consumers about its uses and ingredients. Observing the huge potential, other competitors like Top Ramen emerged during 1990 which reduced the sales of maggi. To overcome, maggi did brand extension by introducing some new taste variants of Desi sub segments like tomato, chicken, masala, shahi pulao, chilli chow.

In 1997 adding to brand extension NIL changed the flavor formulation which turned as a big mistake for it, as it was not accepted by the consumer. So they reintroduced the old formulation of brand. New competitors started emerging. Sustaining in the changing consumer behavior was a big challenge for maggi. For that they organized contest, games, and industrial visits for school kids. They tried to attract new customers by providing bluff tastes. They spend a huge amount of work for maintaining same taste and nutrition. Their efforts turned to benefit as maggi became the leader in 2000. They further repositioned themselves as a Healthy product – products like Atta noodles in 2005, rice noodles, extra protein noodles (20% extra protein), Dal atta noodles in 2006. Consumers didn’t find it much tasty still NIL was good enough to promote it for health conscious peoples. Maggi worked out very intelligently to deal up with changing perception of consumers for health concerns, tastes etc.

The best of all is maggi has established itself with consumers’ emotion. Today if you go on asking some or the other person is having a story to tell about his or her maggi experience and why not its ME or Meri Maggi . We are having our own maggi recipes to share.

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