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At Goafest 2025, Rajeev Jain - Sr. Vice President, Corporate Marketing at DS Group spoke on the topic, “Cultural Marketing can be a Winner: Pulse Candy a Case Study.”
In his presentation Jain highlighted the understanding of cultural marketing and how DS Group captured Indian consumers’ nuances, cultures and taste buds and used cultural marketing to successfully build the brand, ‘Pulse.’
He started his session by sharing successful international campaigns that leveraged cultural marketing. The first example was Coco-Cola in Saudi Arabia where Pepsi was the market leader with an 80% market share. When Saudi Arabia issued a royal decree allowing women in Saudi Arabia to drive, this move drew a lot of criticism in the country. As this was a controversial topic, many brands chose to remain silent. Coco-Cola availed the opportunity with a campaign that showed a father teaching his daughter to drive a car. This Coco-Cola campaign drew accolades and helped gain market share.
Another interesting case study was from Nestle in Japan in the 1970s. Nestle launched Nescafe in Japan with a huge investment, and a big launch with the assumption of success. However, the product proved to be a big failure. Research showed that Japan was a tea country with people consuming the beverage from childhood. Nestle went back to the drawing board, developed another strategy and launched a coffee-flavoured candy for children. After a few years, Nescafe was relaunched and today Japan is one of the biggest markets for the brand,
Jain says, “Culture includes our values, norms, customs, traditions, beliefs, religion, rituals and artifacts. It is the way we think, act and interact and the lens through which we see things.” He continues, “The power of cultural marketing is how brands have aligned their product offering as per the culture of the country or have developed the culture altogether.”
Showcasing an Indian example, Jain says that Maggi noodles was launched in India as snacks. If the company had launched it as an alternative to lunch or dinner, it might have been a failure. Instead, they launched it as a snack for when children came home from school and this helped the brand enter and conquer Indian kitchens. Similarly Cadbury understood that Indians distribute sweets on many occasions and if they had to build a big brand they changed their offering from occasion-based to a meetha, with the tagline, “kuch meetha ho jaye”.
Understanding The Indian Insights
Looking to understand the Indian consumer, Jain highlights that Indian housewives are value conscious and not cost-conscious, and are ready to pay extra provided they feel there is extra value to it. Jain says, “This was a very important insight that we have always followed religiously in our various brands. Whenever we develop a brand and find that we are not able to sell it at the lowest price, we don’t mind that we sell it at a higher price as the consumer is ready to pay provided you give them good quality.”
The other key insights from Indian consumers are that – Indians enjoy liveliness and togetherness, prefer and like multiplicity in taste, like variety, love tangy taste (love masalas), have a nostalgia for Indian flavours, prefer shifting towards organic and natural products (are going back to roots), adopt whatever we find good and are fluid when it comes to age barriers in trying different product offerings. Jain says, “Indianess is now perceived to be cool and happening and there is a growing trend towards Indianness and cultural values.”
DS Group – Focus on Indian tastebuds
As an Indian company, DS Group has a legacy of 95 years and have understood Indian consumer taste buds and looked to develop products as per their taste buds. Jain says, “What we found is that there is an inherent taste for Indian products but at times Indian products take a back seat when we don’t find them in hygienic form, in exciting packaging with reliable and good branding and imagery and that gap is what we have tried to fill.”
He highlights that the core strengths of DS groups have been that they are experts in flavours and fragrances and know how to play with flavours and fragrance with a focus innovation and quality, has good distribution aa infrastructure.” Jain says, “One thing we have seen in food is that if you invest in the quality of a product, the pressure on advertising becomes less. So, we believe that if we invest in quality and develop a good product, it will sell.”
Launching Brand Pulse
When DS Group looked at launching a candy in a cluttered market, the company was clear in its focus strategy. Jain states, “We were clear in our mind that unless we launch a disruptive and innovative product, we won’t be able to crack this market.”
The company studied the Indian hard boiled candy (HBC) market and found that 50% of the HBC candy market was in mango flavour with 26% being raw mango and 24% being mango. Jain shares, “We found that there was monotony in the candy segment, consumer loyalty was negligible, there was cluttered competition with the consumption skewed towards kids and price point was 50 paisa. We studied that consumers had a nostalgia for Indian taste and flavours and people enjoyed raw mango with spice, this was the basic insight behind Pulse.”
Another insight was that though the mango flavour dominated the HBC category, there were limited options for youth and adults and the industry lacked innovation. After two years of extensive R&D, market research, consumer studies, the strategy to give authentic nostalgic Indian taste to consumers, various product formulations and sampling Pulse was launched
Breaking All The Norms: The Pulse-sating Success Story
Speaking on what went behind the success of Pulse, Jain shared some key insights.
Creating A Differentiated Product And Enhanced Consumer Experience: Instead of a regular candy, Pulse had a center filled candy, while the longevity of other candies was less, Pulse had higher longevity with tangy blasts after some time.
Changed Consumer Perception: The other candies present in the market targeted children, in this case Pulse was decided to not just focus on kids but target the larger population as this made the canvas bigger.
Adopted Clutter Breaking Price Point: Before the launch of Pulse, 86% of the category was operating at a price-point of 50 paise. However, when Pulse was developed, the costing meant that the product would not be sold at 50 paise. Jain shares, “It was a very big question before the marketing and sales department; shall we sell at Rs 1, when all brands are priced at 50 paise. In addition, we increased the weight of the product from category average of 2.4 g to 4g each. We believed that if consumers saw value they will pay extra. We took a very big risk when we launched at Rs 1.”
Maximized Reach and Penetration: The strategy used for Pulse was to penetrate deep and reach more consumers through different outlets as this will lead to higher sales. Wherever the company saw that the consumer segment penetration was low, it increased the penetration across different consumer segments.
Leveraged Pan Plus Distribution: Typically, all candy brands were available in confectionary and grocery outlets, however DS Group’s strong foothold was pan plus outlets. Jain explains, “Pan plus outlets offer an opportunity to drive impulse purchases, catering to consumer craving to pop something in their mouth. With increased demand, we started placement in General Trade, Modern Trade and e-commerce networks.
Maintained Consistent Quality: A key challenge that emerged was that with higher demand, production had to be amped up. The company successfully developed 9 CMUs (contract manufacturing units) within a short span and developed fool proof mechanism and strict quality control to ensure consistent quality.
Established Disruptive Communication Via Influencer Activation: In 2015, all brands were heavy on Television and digital was still at a nascent stage. The challenge for Pulse was that being a new entrant, it could not compete with other brands in GRPs. The team had to take a different approach. It launched the product through social media and influencer marketing, focusing heavily on BTL and merchandising. It used influencers such as VJ Jose, Ashnoor Kaur, and Ashi Singh.
User Generated Content + Consumer Advocacy: What helped brand Pulse and took the company by surprise was the response from the consumers to the product. Many consumers took to make User Generated Content (UGC), on their own accord, making videos and sharing on Digital and with the company. Also, high consumer advocacy helped build the brand, based only on the taste and quality of the product. Jain quips, “After one year, we told the management, we don’t need marketing money for another year as there was noise in the market by influencers and consumer advocacy on social media.”
Lookalike Challenge: Following Pulse’s success several counterfeits’ products emerged. We countered this with effective communication to trade and consumers via social media
The Success Story
The brand achieved phenomenal success rapidly with Rs 100 crore in sales in 8 months. It became the number one brand within two years of launch, in 2017, without any ATL campaign. Infact, Pulse’s first ATL campaign was launched in 2017 with the tagline was Pran Jaaye Par pulse na jaaye,
Jain says, “This is a classic example, that without any ATL campaign also, you can be number 1 provided you develop the right product as per consumer tastebuds, good quality, understanding consumer insights, picking up consumer nuances and cultural value. The craving for mango with masala was the insight we picked up basis which we could developed into brand Pulse and we leveraged BTL and digital media” The company has also developed multiple activations and IPs such as Pulse ka Pandal, Pulse Candy Day, Pulse Compliment Day, Pulse Ganesh Chaturthi and Grab The Pulse mall activation amongst others.
Today, Jain shares the success story with pride and says, “Pulse is the number one hard boiled candy brand for the last nine years and is present in more than 35 lakh outlets. The sales of Pulse is 2X of the number two brand in the category. In a way this has built a category itself, this is no more a HBC category market, we call it Indian ethnic confectionary, we have coined a new terminology for the category we have developed.” He continues, “While the HBC category was growing at 3.14% CARG over the last five years, Pulse has grown by 12.41%. Pulse upgraded the HBC category from a 50 paise price point to Rs 1. At the time of Pulse’s launch 86% of the category was at 50 paise price point, today 86% of the category is at Re 1. After us, all the other brand also upgraded to the price point. This is the power of cultural marketing.”
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