P&G has filed a case in the Calcutta High Court against Hindustan Unilever’s new ad campaign, which openly challenges the superiority of its product Rin over P&G’s Tide

The battle for market share in laundry segment has spread from pricing to other platforms now making it an open war. P&G has filed a case in the Calcutta High Court against Hindustan Unilever’s new ad campaign, which openly challenges the superiority of its product Rin over P&G’s Tide. CNBC-TV18’s Tanvi Shukla delves deeper on this new form of advertising and traces it back to what triggered the issue.

HUL’s new Rin campaign claims in an advertisement that Rin provides more brightness in comparison to Tide Naturals, which is the new product that P&G launched a couple of months ago in the mass segment positioning it against Rin as well as Wheel.

The reason that triggered this campaign is HULs new found aggression to regain market share and arrest the decline in market share that it has seen specifically in the laundry segment. Also, Tide Natural came up with an advertisement a few weeks ago where it claimed it provided whiteness with a special fragrance. HUL subsequently challenged Tide’s claim in the Chennai High Court. On March 1, the court asked P&G to modify the ad since they were not really able to substantiate the claim. A written judgement is still awaited on this matter.

Meanwhile advertising watchdog ASCI has said it has issued a notice to FMCG major HUL asking it to “substantiate” in 15 days its claim in a TV commercial that its washing powder Rin is better than rival P&G’s Tide.

When contacted, HUL denied receiving any notice from ASCI
and said the Rin commercial is in line with advertising code followed by the industry. “The claim is factual, accurate and substantiated as it is based on laboratory tests done through globally accepted protocols in independent third party laboratories,” an HUL spokesperson said.

A P&G spokesperson, on other hand, said, “We are aware of the disparaging advertisement on air against Tide Naturals and have filed a case against the same. The matter is currently being heard in the court and we are not in a position to comment on the outcome.”

In an interview with CNBC-TV18, Shripad Nadkarni, Founder Director, Marketgate consulting and Harish Bijoor, Brand Consultant & CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc spoke on the issue.

Here is a verbatim transcript of the interview. Also watch the accompanying video.

Q: What did you make of this battle between Rin and Tide? Will the consumer of Rin bite?

Bijoor: The consumer out there is a new consumer today and the consumer wants to have some fun and at the end of the day I do believe this kind of in the eye kind of advertising which pokes fun at the other brand or talks about superiority of one brand over the other tends to work, consumers aren’t really concerned about the fact that possibly that was not the done thing and consumer’s love this and to an extent people tend to talk about it a lot, people have never have comment about the detergent dull detergent advertising are going to be talking about detergent advertising all of a sudden that seems to be the objective.

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