Opinion Can ‘swadeshi’ Campa Cola capture the Gen Z kombucha market?

The promised “excitement in the beverage segment” may only play out over the next few months, but the announcement certainly triggered immediate and palpable excitement in the media. News outlets rummaged through their archives to fish out stories about the rise and fall of Pure Drinks and the Campa brand at the turn of the century. Twitter was awash with sepia-toned pictures of Campa Cola banners and grainy videos of TV advertisements from the heydays of the brand in the eighties. News channels conducted interviews with middle-aged citizens, some of whom remembered the “distinct” taste of the bottled drink of their childhood. If Reliance had banked on mining the nostalgia for a forgotten relic to add some fizz to the announcement of the Campa brand relaunch, its bet has reaped rich rewards. But once the warm and fuzzy glow imbued by wistful longing for a bygone era dampens, what does the future hold for Campa Cola?

In its original avatar, the Campa brand existed — and flourished — in a different milieu. Coca-Cola had exited the Indian market after regulatory changes in 1977 and PepsiCo would not make an appearance until the late Eighties. Thus, the absence of global competitors had seen local players rule the roost through the eighties and early nineties. Campa jostled for market share with other popular drinks like Limca, Thums Up, and Gold Spot (which were owned by Parle) and soon became a household name on the back of an impressive marketing strategy.

Even today, Indians of a certain vintage have fond memories of Campa as a brand that was young and effervescent. Campa had earned the coveted title of being “cool” in an age of Ambassador cars and Doordarshan, of trunk calls and telegrams, of audio cassettes and transistor radios. In a 1983 advertisement featuring a frenetic, rock-n-roll jingle that could trace its roots to the American Midwest, a svelte, teenaged Salman Khan was shown chugging bottles of Campa Cola while a group of young, carefree Indians swam and frolicked in the pristine blue waters and beaches of the Andamans. This was the aspirational vision that Campa sold to its thirsty consumers – a world that was far removed from the dusty streets of pre-liberalised India and set to a background score of popular Western music.

TV commercials of this nature may have been designed to make the indigenous brand feel “international”, but Campa was acutely aware of the symbolic power of its origin story as well. Pure Drinks launched the brand in the late 1970s to capitalise on the exit of Coca-Cola from the country. The shrewdly worded tagline, “The Great Indian Taste”, embellished the brand’s swadeshi identity while also declaring it as the national choice. This lofty claim had not been sufficient to avert Campa’s demise in the early 2000s, when it was forced to close shop after being unable to compete with the aggressive marketing and distribution strategy of PepsiCo and Coca-Cola.

Now, having been resurrected, Campa will once again be pitted against its vanquishers. The American giants continue to dominate the beverage market in India, which looks very different today from the way it did in the 1980s. For instance, Campa’s competitors and compatriots from that era — Limca, Thums Up, and Gold Spot — are currently owned by Coca-Cola. In this new world, Campa’s success depends on its ability to disrupt the status quo.

A marketing plan hinged on nostalgia may have helped garner headlines but it may not be as successful in boosting sales. A large majority of those who remember the Campa brand and associate it with rose-tinted memories of their youth, may have cheered its relaunch but are more likely — whether out of choice or the dietary prescriptions of middle-age — to choose kombucha over sugary soft drinks. For the Gen Z customers, on the other hand, Campa has little to no brand recall and scant nostalgic currency to trade on. As such, in order to challenge the American duo and carve its own space in the market, Campa will need to create a bespoke identity that resonates with customers. And this makes the prescient, proto, “Make in India” tagline of the Campa brand all the more relevant in today’s economic and political climate.

In a different millennium, the “Indian-ness” of Campa was advertised as yet another facet of its superiority over other local and multinational players in the industry. “The Great Indian Taste” was meant to satiate Indians and leave no room for them to pine for fizzy drinks of foreign origins. After all, what better emotion than patriotic fervour to battle the influence of western beverages on Indian minds?

Five decades later, when the world has grown smaller, and yet more insular, the brand’s new owners did not miss the opportunity to once again use cola to invoke nationalistic pride. “With 50 years of rich heritage,” the relaunch announcement stated, “Campa’s contemporary cut-through character is set to offer Indian consumers ‘The Great Indian Taste’ this summer.” Campa 2.0 artfully used nostalgia to script a successful relaunch. It remains to be seen if it will use nationalism to script a fairy-tale return to the market.

Banerjee is a Mumbai-based lawyer and writer