One brand which failed only due to wrong marketing strategy is Liril.

When the brand was launched the Liril girl became the talk of the town. Liril was positioned on the freshness platform right from its birth. The girl and the waterfall with the unique jingle ensured that the freshness is experienced by the audience. But the brand did not change its position for 25 years. There was a flurry of brand launches during the past 10 years and Liril was sleeping all the time " may be resting on the laurel. Liril tried to introduce the Icy mint variant very late and that too with a different jingle and imagery. But it did not work and the product failed. Liril : Bring back the Liril girl

Brand : Liril Company : HLL Agency : Lowe If you are looking for a case of an iconic Brand that is going to be killed by poor marketing strategy , look no further, here is Liril for you. Launched in 1975, the year I was born, this is a brand that built a segment or should I say category for it self in the Indian market. The brand is also the testimony to the genius of India's Ad man Alyque Padamsee. This is what he says about the Liril Brand

The name Liril had been registered by Hindustan Lever from a list sent to them by Unilever in London. Levers were very keen that the soap have striations, wiggly stripes of different colours running across the tablet. I recommended the tablet be blue because waterfall is blue with white striations. Hindustan Lever was very excited and produced 1,000 tablets for testing. At this point Derk Wooller, the Marketing Controller of Hindustan Lever's soaps division, stepped in and suggested we add the freshness of lime to our story. He felt that though the waterfall had tremendous emotional appeal, Liril needed a rational ingredient to clinch the deal. I was not averse to this but suggested that we do an `As marketed' test: Blue Liril versus Green Liril with limes. I was wrong and Wooller was right. The rest is history." Alyque Padamsee in his book A Double Life. The brand was a run away success and the Liril girl became the talk of the town. The brand has

beenconsistentt with its communication and the effective use of brand imagery. Further on brand imagery can be found in this article , visithttp://www.blonnet.com/catalyst/2004/09/23/stories/2004092300100200.htm Liril was positioned on the freshness platform right from its birth. The girl and the waterfall with the unique jingle ensured that the freshness is experienced by the

audience. Liril can be called as an experiential brand and the communication perfectly supported that. Liril did not change its positioning for 25 years although the models changed, the brand communication was consistent. Then some nut in the company or the agency thought that they should change the communication that worked so effectively. The rest as I say it " Liril became history". Liril has changed the imagery and the jingle in the name of freshness .The new jingle or the ad never had that freshness. That is why Liril had to change the Ads twice with in a span of five years. Mind you Liril never changed its imagery or the Jingle for 25 years... Reports say that Liril had to change because of its stagnant marketshare. I think there are reasons for declining market share which can be that the brand failed to understand the changing consumer expectations. There was a flurry of brand launches during the past 10 years and Liril was sleeping all the time " may be resting on the laurels" . It should have hold on its positioning of ' freshness " not by changing its communication but by communicating more, developing variants, bringing in flanking brands or variants

and thus owning the whole segment for itself. But it never happened , Liril tried to introduce the Icy mint variant very late and that too with a different jingle and imagery. We knew that the Old Liril had died. HLL could have used the same communication strategy . Then came the horrible experiment of Orange Liril with a stupid Jingle OOFYUMMA.... excuse me what the hell is that? The product failed. Then came the new campaign involving a couple and a new jingle " La-ira -ela", the ad was good but where is liril ? Like Onida , Liril has to come back with the old imagery and old jingle that made liril what it Is ( or WAS?) [ It is a prediction]. When it does that consumers will take the brand to their heart .

Laaaaa lalalala laaa ................... Brand Update : Liril After a long long time, the iconic Liril is back. Yesterday I saw the new tvc for Liril. The campaign looks foreign, complete with foreign models and settings.

The new tvc talks about 2000 points in our body which when touched will refresh us!!!! The ad uses the theme of a playful interaction between a father and baby to

drive sensitive body points.

home the power of touch and these 2000

The ad claims that using Liril will rejuvenate those 2000 body points to keep you FRESH... Well... some brands will never learn from mistakes. After the dumping of the famous imagery of Liril girl and the waterfall, the brand has never recovered. The fall of this iconic brand was accelerated by some stupid campaigns like Uff Umma and mindless product-line extensions like Orange Liril. Now comes another half-hearted attempt to rejuvenate the brand. Although the new ad has a touch of class, it does not gel with the brand image of Liril that we had in our mind. Another interesting development is that the entire product has also being changed. The brand packaging has been changed to dark green and the shape of the soap is changed to rectangle. I still don't understand why the brand has not thought about bringing back its iconic positioning on freshness and its brand element of waterfall and still famous music. I am

not saying that the brand should exactly replicate the earlier ads but it can creatively take advantage of that brand image which is still there in the consumer's mind.

Liril's consumers has become old and the new generation does not know much about this brand. But the collective memory and images are still there in the consumer space. It is also interesting to note that no other brand has been able to take up the space of Liril. So there is still lot of opportunity for Liril but going by the new campaign, that opportunity has been wasted miserably.

As a consumer , I still miss this soap. Update Liril soap was first popularized by the signature imagery of a bikini-clad girl under a waterfall and owned the proposition of freshness in that category for a long time. Then it decided to go through several different permutations and combinations, with more people squeezed into the ad each time. The ad for Liril 2000 claims to rejuvenate 2,000 body points with every use, but fails to click like the original.

A spokesperson from Hindustan Unilever Ltd, however, explains that while it it is good to be iconic, it is critical to remain relevant to the current consumers. With the changing social context, the key issue being addressed by the Liril of 70s was no longer relevant to the consumers (higher socio-economic class urban women) of today.

Liril is dead. Long live Liril. AUGUST 9, 2009 So Liril is officially dead. And it is back as Liril 2000 with new packaging, an improved product and a new positioning as a family freshness soap. The new ad is devoid of the iconic waterfall metaphor. Not surprisingly, it is a hot topic of discussion in theadvertising & marketing community. First off, I would say that it seems like a lets try this and see what happens kind of effort to revive the once-popular brand. The brands market share is down to 1.2%, a far cry from the once 14% share.

The nomenclature, positioning and claim of rejuvenating 2000 body points is obviously borrowed from Lever 2000. The debate over the new Liril is only partly about the surrogate attempt to bring in Lever 2000. The larger issue is about the various failed attempts to revive the brand. Everyone is singing paeans about the very first Karen Lunel ad, which set the platform for Lirils growth. The ads that followed set in the desert, under a different waterfall, in a car wash, in the rain, amongst dolphins did not really create the hype of the first ad. The catchy jingle of the first ad was also tinkered with, new signature tunes and tag lines (taazgi mein tunn!) were also attempted. So is it about trying too many things in ads and a failure of advertising? Only partly. The core values of the brand tingling freshness were perhaps never consistentlycarried through the years. I am not saying that they should have only retained the waterfall metaphor it was only an executional idea, not the essence of the brand. Several variants (Cologne, Rainfresh) and brand extensions (shower gel) were attempted to revive the brand. The last avatar, in 2007, was set in the bedroom and the sensuous ad claimed that the magic is back. It wasnt. And it was a totally different animal from the one in 1985. So instead of sticking to one single benefit tingling freshness several disparate attempts have been made over the years. Of course, in hindsight ones vision is 20-20. Some say that just bringing in the old waterfall ad and the jingle should be good enough to revive the brand. One is not sure. The Karen Lunel ad is perhaps a fuzzy memory for most of the potential target audience of Liril today. If they had been consistently with one core brand property and an executional element over the years (perhaps the jingle) it would have been easier to build on it today. But the brand has seen so many transitions and changes it is difficult to anchor it on any one core property. As an aside, the product experience of Liril 2000 was good at least for me but at Rs.30, it will not be within reach of all. Will it revive the fortunes of brand Liril? Any easy answers? Perhaps not.