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Say 'Maggi', you get '2 minutes' in response. But the brand is talking '5' all of a sudden. About one-score years ago, India came to be acquainted with a noodles brand conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that 2 minutes is all it should take-to fulfill the primary needs of our children. Maggi 2-minutes noodles, it was, a brand from Nestle. How long the idea would endure was not really under much debate. After all, in India, '2 minutes' can often stretch from 120 seconds to something approaching infinity---going by the precepts of 'Indian Stretchable Time', as Paul Davies calls it in his hilarious new book, 'What Is This India Business?' Anyhow, the brand caught on like nobody's business. It aimed its message of economic pragmatism and quick convenience (hardly the stuff of good mamta-laden motherhood back then) at the mother, while enticing children with taste and fun. Mothers loved it. Kids loved it even more. Maggi was a rapid-growth brand. The noodles sold and sold and sold. In tens of thousands of tonnes---by the 1990s. Sadly, by that time, the idealism of the 2-minute part had ended up as just something written in plastic. Not that the phrase itself was forgotten. In word association tests, 'Maggi' would elicit '2 minutes' from young and old alike. But it wasn't very potent as a message anymore. Growth was good, you see---so why bother? Except that growth would eventually run into trouble---and it did. A spice here or a spice there was no longer good enough to get the old brand feeling back. Some years ago, Maggi did the smart thing. It started thinking long-term again. It turned its attention away from mothers to kids---a whole new generation---and gave them a lyrical earful of music as a few seconds of melodious relief from all the biff-bam-boom of cartoons. Is the brand re-dedicating itself to the classic proposition? That's not quite evident. But some new moves have just been made to rejig the brand portfolio for Indian market realities. Call it pragmatism, call it what you will, Maggi has launched a small noodles pack for Rs 5. Five? Yes. For that's the 'price point' figure that seems to have caught the Indian bite n beverage market's fancy, of late. Coca-Cola made a big do about its Rs 5 'chhota Coke', and pulled off a marketing coup of sorts---especially in far-flung territories where the aggressive 'paanch' advertising went down particularly well. Now Maggi has its own 'five' offering in the arena---and this could prove equally well-loved. For that, though, the brand will have to go beyond economic pragmatism (a given, since Rs 5 resonates so well with kitchen budgets), and get serious about the 2-minute proposition as well. This demands some truly creative advertising---harmonized with the cartoon breaks of the brand's flag-bearing product, no less. Oh, one other thing. There's also this other product that Maggi has launched-unnoticed in the melee. Maggi Magic Cube. Another price-point pitch? Naah. At least not price and price alone. Success takes much more, and the brand knows it. The direction this latest new sub-brand takes may or may not be relevant to the main brand and its proposition, but it would help if it acts in synergy with the rest. Getting a Big Idea to endure can take quite some doing.
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