Brand Issue of Buavita
To drive brand success, a brand must know how to communicate their brand value propositions in every brand touchpoint so that it could give a sensory-emotional connection to customers.
Since its establishment in 1971, and acquired by Unilever in 2008, Buavita has become a market leader in the juice-based RTD in Indonesia. Buavita itself has a primary market of urban moms who already have children between 5–12 years old, followed by the second and tertiary market of sports-active women and women-workers. Buavita brand also has a direct competitor of ABC Juice and Minute Maid, indirect competitors of UHT milk such as Ultramilk from the perspective of the primary target market. For the product itself, Buavita offers Buavita classic and Royale to the market, simplify, Royale is a mix of vegetables and fruits that were intended for the tertiary target market.
Somehow the packaging entices the idea of a sweetened, artificial taste, therefore as the Competitive PoP, Buavita mainly communicates the real fruits facts throughout the brand touch-point. This case also occurs for Comparative PoP, in which the industrial design and distribution channel shaping the pov of low-quality products, and Buavita also has shown to communicate the thickness of the juice, as it was one of the main factors for know-it-all customer.
This mature brand has done numerous brand communications throughout online and offline brand touch-points.
For the crucial online brand-building tools, Buavita uses websites and SEO, online video contents, image marketing, and social media marketing (Facebook and Instagram)
On the official website, Buavita brand itself as a healthy-consumption, made of real fruits and can be creatively handled.
The terms “made of real fruits” are shown to be highlighted across the website touch-points. Start from FAQ, which initiates with questions of the differentiator of real fruits, real fruits beverage, and fruits flavor drink. Proceed with product overview, which shows the Buavita facts of 1 bottled juice equal to 1 real fruit. This message also communicates at the ‘Tentang Buavita’ segment, which stated how Buavita ingredients are real fruits that proceeded with high UHT technology. These real fruits also associated with healthy consumption, as Buavita also published some of the articles that indicate consuming real fruits might lead to a balanced diet, remove disease, initiate a healthy lifestyle, etc. and it was on the section articles of real fruits and Buavita, to make it closely associated.
There is a unique feature on the main homepage of the Buavita official website, the Vitamin Meter. The Vitamin Meter allows web visitors to calculate the daily weight of specific fruits they have/need to keep fit.
Now we will proceed to the online video contents, which are posted on Youtube and social media like Facebook and Instagram. The videos are mostly included TVC and cooking shows.
There are many TVC that Buavita has passed by, but I will discuss only the brand message to know the communications flow throughout the years.
The message that most of the TVC wants to convey is the real fruits ingredients, health-benefits, for mom to give the best for family-wellness
The collectivism, superego, and femininity, are the cultural-values aspect shown clearly in the Buavita TVCs. And most of it associates with family-wellness from 2011 until 2020, with an exception 2013 ones which promote the benefits of antioxidants, the collagen that portrays still-youthful adult upper-class women persona without the presents of the family.
The TVCs mostly communicate about the real fruits agenda whether it is 2011 commercial that communicates the message of 8 times more real fruits, the 2015 guava juice as the highest contains Vit C rather than orange and pear, the 2016 TVCs that highlight 3 times more fruits ingredients, or the recent 2020 that communicate the 100% contains Vitamins.
As for the tagline of the campaign itself, it varies, but the most noticeable is the Be Friutarian campaign of 2008–2016, as the campaign message was used for quite a long time, and the terms are unique, short, yet memorable. But now it is not used again, instead, Buavita uses more of #NutrisiDariAlam in their TVCs as of recent. This “alam” message is also done by indirect competitors such as Teh Kotak #PersembahanDariAlam and Aqua #KebaikanAlam. This new tagline wants to appeal to the Competitive and Comparative PoP of Buavita as made from natural ingredients, and trustable.
Besides the advertising campaign videos, Buavita also published many cooking recipes on Youtube. The ‘Resep Nikmat Buavita’ marketing strategy has been used by Buavita constantly since early 2013, with using the brand Ambassador of Chef Edwin Lau and followed by Chef Yuda in 2014. The recipes are mainly beverages, and a little portion of it is food. The recipes also mostly go-for the practical, easy, and fast to make as shown in the average video's duration are estimated to be 1 minute 30 seconds. This marketing strategy was derived two factors, first is the target market behavior of surfing the internet to search on cooking recipes. Second, Buavita wants to compete with its strong indirect competitor of RTD packaged milk, that most of the moms still bought for their children for the utility to be consumed or processed into a new dish.
As for the image marketing that includes marketing strategies, Buavita displays 3 segments, portraying the primary, secondary, and tertiary target market’s personal factors such as Maslow's psychological needs, Schwartz conservation values, and culture such as Ramadan month celebration.
Social media marketing enhancement is one of the most crucial marketing strategy optimizations of the B2C brand. Buavita itself mainly optimizing on Instagram and Facebook. In their social media, Buavita adapts an integrated marketing message across its channel, which highlighting product benefits, sales promotion, recipes sharing, and events.
So next, I will go talk about offline brand communication, and it compromises of events and experiences and merchandise display.
Buavita has made a myriad of events and experiences, some of the BTL strategies are included in the gallery of events attached to their official website. These events include the attended ones, free promotional campaigns, sponsorships, and merchandise display.
For the attended events, Buavita does collaborate with partners such as Kompas which held a fruit mission event, that does cycling collectively in a car-free-day. There is also partnering with Hijup.com and Laiga magazine which also attended by brand ambassador Chef Edwin Lau to do a cooking workshop with the urban mom affiliated in Buavita and partner communities. The events attended by Buavita mainly correlations with the brand message of health-benefits and to promote further the mixology utilizations of the product.
For free promotional campaigns, Buavita does photography competition, as a meant to introduce the new product launch, Buavita Royale. By correlating the essence of inspiration to the women-worker by protecting the eye-health, increasing focus by consuming the Buavita, the brand wants to tap into the tertiary market.
There are also 14 galleries of events, where Buavita made a mini booth inside of a supermarket, and it usually promotes Buavita packaged juice with samples or challenges and community development.
As for the sponsorship, Buavita has funds the1st Color Run in Jakarta that was a hype between the teenagers to young adults, who is seeking for entertainment with their friends and considered this event as a way to boost their influence. This event also promotes bring happiness and healthy acts by running, which also aligned with Buavita. Not only that, but Buavita also built a small booth to give some samples and selling Buavita products for the audiences.
Buavita has done samples in a supermarket, ask moms to compare between two glasses of juice and decide which beverage made from real fruits, the answers are varied, and it was documented and shared via YouTube. But the majority of answers lead to Buavita, therefore by publishing it to a wider audience, Buavita could enhance their message from real-situations.
Co-branding is one of the key strategies that a renowned brand could joint-power to extend new or penetrate the existing markets, and release entirely new products or make a co-product with their core features. There are many reasons as to why the brands want to do co-branding, one of them is to expand market segments, exchange resources, reduce costs, etc.
It is no means untouched by Buavita, the brand has done a co-brand in 2011–2013 with the brand Walls, an ice cream brand under the same parent company. It is quite successful in the past, as even in 2020, the product is included in one of the ice cream lists that netizens demanded to re-launch. Not only that, the utmost present co-branding is the Buavita x Gulu Gulu which penetrate the existing market while making new products with similar core feature as both of them.
The brand Buavita also has done licensing with Frozen characters that were attached to the product packaging to attract children. The licensing was done in 2020, as the product displays of Buavita itself is located in the third from the below, and the products we're surrounded by milk, coffee, and tea. They expect moms will feel attached to the drink as it uses the characters they children might like because since the pandemic hit, there are fewer children tagged along with by their mom to shop.
The contents above are the short-version of the full elaborations of Buavita touchpoints, ranged by years, which can be found in here
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As we already know about the Buavita’s brand touchpoint and all of the brand communication message that the brand wants to envoy from its touchpoint, now we must assess whether a desirable outcome or perception of the brand is resonates with the brand image, then we proceed to analyze whether the online brand touchpoint’s brand communication strategy is effective.
For online brand touchpoints, the Buavita official website has been marketed quite effectively, as I see the brand message that Buavita wants to convey is quite frontal and but loud. Although, I have little concern about the Vitamin Meters, so if you already know, the Vitamin Meter after click was looked like this
And I, as a novice visitors were quite confused at first of the point of this Vitamin Meter, which turns out to be the weight of the fruits needed to be consumed daily. But I think that some of the target markets may have not had a weight measurement tool, although Buavita wants to penetrate the primary target market which has the behavior of prefer to cook herself than delivery, which Buavita may have an idea that kind of target market would have the tools, to say the least, Buavita also needs to concern over the secondary and the tertiary which could do not have the measurement tools as it is not their urgency of behavior.
I also want to convey the brand issues shown in the TVC across the years and compare them with the utmost recently. As I mentioned before, from 2014 up till now, the visual, audio, scenario, script is identical, meanwhile, the highlighted message does not, it was constantly changing.
Take an example of the message in 2015, which highlights guava juice as the winner of “highest vitamin c”, the 2016 “3 times more fruit ingredients”, and the utmost recent 2020 of “100% contains Vitamins”.
From my POV, the unchanging videos on top of the ever-changing messages could raise people's confusion about the real brand benefits. Although, I must say that using the “100% Vitamins” card is a well-played game during pandemic situations. But I think Buavita also has to quickly consider the future planning for the message campaign, as the market which highlights a similar message has become more saturated. Direct competitors have stronger association with Vitamins C scenario, like the Minute Main “Sumber Vitamin C” or YOU C 1000 Orange Water with their “1000 MG Vitamin C”.
Then the next assessment will be the social media effectiveness, which started from Instagram, which turns out to have an issue of ever-decreasing engagement performance of the Buavita social media Instagram page. Taken from Analisa.io,
The average engagement of the official Instagram is only 0,3% or a low engagement rate, way more, the growth is decreasing overtime since 2018 (above graph) and the last 5 months (below graph). I think this low engagement indicates the people or less the target market has a lack of interest in the Instagram contents, which contain the information’s about the Buavita product benefits, sales promotion, recipes sharing, and events. Although post relevancy is highly shown in the most used hashtag and the words most used in the caption.
So what’s going wrong? from my observations, Buavita seems to haven’t do WOW factors that could turn the target market attention through their social media. Their marketing strategy is also relatively conservative, such as doing the same tactics all over again. This is shown by the cooking recipes that done many times.
Furthermore, Buavita also seems like not integrated enough in their official homepage of Instagram. A potential customer could meet brand-touch points in all directions be it online or offline, specifically from exploring, or they have an initial objective to search Buavita account, yet little can we assured that they will really click on Buavita hashtag to see that there are many people and influencers who do Buavita promotions.
And the recent Instagram account seems too unactive shown with occurrence of posting, Buavita has been active ‘secretly’, shown through influencers marketing, collaboration with famous Instagram account hometesterid to give competition winners free samples of Buavita 1 liter products, or even the co-branding of Gulu Gulu x Buavita. Yet no new events seem to be shared at their feeds.
For Facebook, the Brand Buavita seems not integrated enough in their brand message, as the new tagline of #NutrisiDariAlam hasn’t been adopted, additionally, the latest post was 2018, and haven’t been any updates ever since. Although the Facebook communities are more proactive in the events and experiences that Buavita held, shown in the comments that reach up to 20–300 comments with content shares up to 1k. And the recipe video contents are shown to be popular.
As for image marketing, I think it already relevant to the target market values, saturated enough, focusing on the family nurturing. Although, I must say that portrayal of sports-women for the secondary target market is not wide enough, as realistically, most the moms would love to do pilates or badminton at best, yet the pictures only include yoga, cycling, and jogging. Maybe if the pictures could tell more, then the people with a similar type of lifestyle will also feel relevant, as the Buavita objective here is to be high in resonance.
For the attended events, it was done effectively, as the show was giving chance for Buavita also present their case, and sometimes Buavita makes it fun by inviting the brand ambassador such as Chef Yuda, although, in the sponsorship, the brand merely make a small booth for sales and giving samples to some of the earliest visitors. Therefore the experience sense by the potential market is lacking for sponsorship, whereas the attended ones are more influencing. This is shown by the articles-published or social media posting by the participants after the events, that dominated mention the name of the brand, their activities, and their commitment or lesson learned.
Lastly, the merchandise display as the offline touchpoint. Shown in the picture above, the Buavita drink of 250 ml is surrounded mostly by milk, and the rest are coffee and tea. This is quite unique as Buavita didn’t display in the juice sections. The purpose of this placement strategy might be to a shaping perception of the brand as a children-purpose drink, and healthy to be consumed. Although, from my observation, amid pandemic, there are more moms who do intend purchase than the unintended one. Therefore the licensing strategy might not be a big factor here.
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The reasons as to why the Buavita still highlight their real fruits brand message year after year is that their target market still has this stereotype about packaged beverages as sweetened drinks. Therefore they want to highlight their competitive and comparative PoP with consistent brand communications across their brand touchpoints. This hypothesis is also supported by interviews that I conduct with two moms when I do observations on the merchandise display in the BORMA store.
I question them using the NPS questions, as how likely are you give your children a Buavita drink, one of them has a 1-year-old kid, while the other has two sons in the elementary school. The first mom said yes she will when her son reaches eligible ages, while the mom with two sons prefers to use another brand or processed it by herself. The dissatisfied mom testifies that she doesn’t believe the real fruit scenario, even though I have shown her the official statement from Buavita itself, even ensure that the BPOPM might be haven’t agreed on the claim.
From the brand touchpoint assessment listings, I’d like to propose the issues about of TVC, and the social media enhancements, because I think both brand touchpoints could deliver the perception about the brand Buavita quite quickly, and it is one of the most definite brand touch-points of all.
The behavior of the primary target market of Buavita is still mostly using TVC as their main reference after WoM. Therefore I thinks that if Buavita wants to perceive as the real fruits more effective, there might be a chance to deepen on the disease remedy brand communication like how the brand communications of Yakult good that communicate good bacteria e-coli, Pocari Sweat ion for the body, Vitamin C drink of YOU C 1000, and Bear Brand for a neutral drink. This strategy might be the alternative to the never-ending communications of real fruits for Buavita RTD packaged juice.
Second, I also want to propose social media enhancement as the 2nd main brand issue as the unintegrated information might confuse the target market of Buavita, makes the flow of communications to be inefficient, and decreasing of engagement which might lead to customer disloyalty.
I also interested in both topics, therefore by taking on those issues, I could maximize my efforts in doing the brand exploratory research which will be conducted later on in the next post.
