Centurion Eveready goes youthful

Eveready, a 100-year-old brand, is set to enter teens!

The dominant player in dry-cell batteries, till now associated with torches, bulky transistor radios and lanterns — stuff that today’s urban youth would rather die than being seeing carrying one — is gearing up to shed its fuddy-duddy image.

The new youth-centric identity would be unveiled with the launch of a slew of energy-guzzling gadgets that today’s teenagers loves to flaunt, Amritanshu Khaitan (pictured), director, Eveready Industries India, told DNA Money.

“We want to associate brand Eveready with today’s youth, and for a start we are launching battery-powered products that they prefer using,” Khaitan said refusing to disclose further.

Amritanshu, 30, Deepak Khaitan’s son, joined the company’s Board in 2011 and has been since working on redefining brand Eveready as its marketing head.

Eveready’s current logo — a cat jumping though the figure nine, symbolising its proverbial nine lives all within an oval red background — would stay, it’s the brand attributes that are being reworked, Khaitan said.

It’s not a moment too soon that Eveready is discovering the virtues of being associated with the youth, a consumer category around which much of the marketing universe revolves around these days, but which the brand hardly looked into.

Post ‘Give me red’ campaign launched in the mid 90s, Eveready’s biggest marketing push till date happened in 2004 when it signed up Amitabh Bachchan, which rejuvenated a stagnant brand as it entered its centenary year.

Then in 2011 it roped in Akshay Kumar to promote its products like the lanterns primarily aimed at semi-urban and rural markets.

None of these brand ambassadors, despite having pan-India appeal across social segments, can’t be specifically identified with the urban youth.

Even as electronic gadgets like digital cameras, MP3 players, video games and even toys started demanding more and more portable energy to run, Eveready continued focusing on traditional usages like torches.

Eveready has been traditionally selling torches alongside batteries and now led lamps to push consumption of batteries.

In between, it tried its hand in leveraging its enviable distribution network to market homecare products, including mosquito repellents.

The initiative never quite took off primarily because of lack of marketing knowledge.
This time Eveready hopes to make it a success, Amritanshu said.