Brand Failures

62 Brand failures
13 Oranjolt
The drink that lost its cool
Rasna Limited is one of the leading soft drinks companies in India, and made
its name in the concentrate market. However, when it has tried to stray from
its specialized niche, it hasn’t had much success. When Rasna experimented
with a fizzy fruit drink called Oranjolt, the brand bombed even before it
could take off. Oranjolt was a fruit drink in which carbonation was used as
a preservative. ‘It was never meant to be a fizzy drink,’ says Rasna’s founder
Piraz Khambatta. He explained that given the threat of foreign competition
it was important to try out new things. ‘If you don’t try new initiatives, you
are stuck,’ he says. So why did it fail Because it was out of sync with retail
practices.
To last, Oranjolt needed to be refrigerated. The problem was that Indian
retailers tend to switch off their shop refrigerators at night. As a result,
Oranjolt faced quality problems. The product has a shelf life of three to four
weeks where other soft drinks were assured a shelf life of over five months.
Servicing outlets was also a problem. ‘We didn’t have a distribution
structure that could allow us to replace the product every three to four weeks,’
admits Khambatta. Even Coke and Pepsi make replacements only once in
three months. Oranjolt was therefore launched in select outlets and could not
expand rapidly.
That was the only effort by Rasna Limited to try its hand beyond its breadand-butter
segment where it still enjoys over 80 per cent of the concentrated
soft drink market share. ‘Now we are trying to reinvent the category and