The Rise and fall of Sunny Delight

Résumé du document

The soft drinks industry is a mature, which is comprised of giant firms such as Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Cadbury Schweppes, who strive to push their long standing brands to the top of the selling charts. In spite of this cut-throat competition, the American consumer products giant proctor & Gamble decided to branch out into this field in the late 1990s. Its marketing wizards were convinced they had identified a gap in the market, and soon came up with an innovative product meant to fill this gap. It was a brand-new juice, called Sunny Delight, was cleverly designed as a compromise between fruit juices and unhealthy fizzy drinks. The advertising campaigns devised by the marketing gurus from Saatchi and Saatchi emphasized the funny side of the product, as well as its healthy attributes – which made the product appealing to both children and parents.

After running a successful trial in the provincial town of Carlisle, proctor & Gamble decided the launch of the product in a big way. In order to capitalize on Sunny Delight's “mum appeal”, the firm flooded consumers with product samples. It also handed out rebate vouchers so as to lure consumers away from their favorite soft drinks.

Extraits

[...] The firm had no other choice but to dispose its “killer product”, and Sunny Delight was eventually sold to private equity firm JW Childs Associates. Proctor & Gamble's major mistake, it seems, was to focus on strategy and marketing issues, and to be quite contemptuous of consumer satisfaction. Instead of urging its product developers to create a juice combining a healthy appeal with genuine healthy attributes, it came up with a drink that had relatively poor features, and based Sunny Delight's business model on mischievous tricks geared which were misleading take, for instance, the use of vegetable oil in order to enhance its appeal to children, or the placement of the product in the chiller cabinet. [...]

[...] The company remained silent, instead of tackling critics head- on. The product's managers first tried to pump up sales by using the fun factor of the beverage. As this policy proved unsuccessful, they made a complete U-turn from the fun factor and started to sell no added-sugar versions of the juice, hoping to rebrand it as a healthy product. But despite all the money and effort spent by Proctor & Gamble to reinvent the tarnished brand, sales never took off again. [...]

[...] Financial scandals, such as the Enron case in the US, and the collapse of Vivendi Universal in France, prompted shareholders to tighten their grip on management, in accordance with the agency and corporate governance theories; meanwhile, public health affairs cast doubt on the integrity of firms (e.g., food-processing giants), and gave a boost to consumers' vigilance. These recent moves coerce companies into more transparency, and more efforts in the field of social and environmental responsibility. The expansion of capitalism and the word-class firm's huge financial power do not mean that big corporates can act without constraints. Proctor & Gamble learned it at its cost. [...]

[...] It was a brand- new juice, called Sunny Delight, was cleverly designed as a compromise between fruit juices and unhealthy fizzy drinks. The advertising campaigns devised by the marketing gurus from Saatchi and Saatchi emphasized the funny side of the product, as well as its healthy attributes which made the product appealing to both children and parents. After running a successful trial in the provincial town of Carlisle, proctor & Gamble decided the launch of the product in a big way. [...]

[...] Thanks to this stroke of genius, sales soared to £160 million a year and Sunny Delight made it to the top in the beverage industry, becoming the largest selling soft drink in the UK behind Coke and Pepsi. This amazing success attracted a lot of attention amongst the media. Alas, it also prompted consumer watchdogs to turn their attention to the product. They carried out an in-depth analysis of the juice, and found out that it was actually not healthier than a basic soda. Some doctors even warned consumers that an excessive in-take of Sunny Delight was likely to jeopardize children's dental health. [...]