Lifebuoy (Successful Repositioning)

Lifebuoy soap is a very old brand of bath soap in Pakistan, Life Buoy is an anti bacterial soap and in the beginning it positioned itself on its antibacterial qualities, life buoy gained a number of customers with this positioning, but then there comes the competition first the Safeguard and then Dettol soap, these two soaps are from very strong companies especially safeguard is on P&G which is one of the largest consumer products companies in the world, Safeguard offers better quality soap with good fragrance, apart from these features, Safeguard adopted fear strategy in its advertisements and it helped it in gaining more customers and soon Safeguard became the first choice in antibacterial soaps. Safeguards effective campaigns including character of Commander Safeguard outturned every competition, only Dettol soap was competing head to head with safeguard. 

All this put Lifebuoy out of lime light and to survive in market, Lifebuoy positioned itself on price it became low price antibacterial soap. This strategy may have boosted short term sales of Lifebuoy but it lost its brand value and credibility in the minds of customers. Lifebuoy needed to reposition itself on quality rather than price.

REPOSITIONING CAMPAIGN

The repositioning campaign of Lifebuoy was started at 2008, but it became more prominent and became effective in 2009, Lifebuoy along with the advertisement has improved its quality and fragrance, most of the people had shifted from lifebuoy because it was low quality and it smelled terribly, as Lifebuoy has improved its quality all it needed to run an effective advertisement campaign to get the customers attention. The advertisement team of Lifebuoy came up with excellent theme “Healthy Hoga Pakistan” and it is targeting parents which is their target market, Lifebuoy made very effective ad and it also used fear strategy (which is effective in case of antibacterial soap). This has enabled Lifebuoy to get more and more customers. Now a days, Lifebuoy is every where in Television, Radio, Newspapers and Billboards, Lifebuoy is running a huge campaign to promote itself which is very necessary in case of repositioning the brand.

With the help of marketing department and advertisement, Lifebuoy has successfully repositioned itself as a quality antibacterial soap with better fragrance and more durability. Many companies try to reposition themselves when they see market trend shifting but most fail to do so. In case of Lifebuoy it has been successful. 
The interesting thing about this campaign is that Lifebuoy is running the same campaign in Pakistan and in India as is done by Uniliver, this suggest that Lifebuoy is considering India and Pakistan as the similar market segment. 
(August 28, 2009)