The latest ads of Maggi’s two new breakfast offerings seem to highlight comfort food as the theme.
The ads for Instant Upma and Instant Poha products were first spotted on Maggi India’s official YouTube channel. It’s the first of the ads of the brand that doesn’t feature a hungry child or a ‘caring’ mother who is shown making the child’s favorite dish.
The ingredients are the heroes of the ad. The ad captures shots of manicured fingers exploring through the flattened rice, the spices as they meet the dish, and fried peanuts and also some chopped vegetables. Both the ads also plays a remixed version of the popular ‘Maggi Maggi Maggi’ tune. This music appears to be a bid to bring trust and familiarity with the users.
The call to do action is fairly simple and easy, just add hot water and the meal is all set. This call to action was earlier used for Maggi’s Cup Noodles offering and also in MTR’s Instant Poha.
Up to this point, only MTR was selling its poha and upma offerings in a ready to make, cup format, pretty similar to cup noodles. But this time, Maggi has chosen to go with packaging something quite similar to its noodles format.
In the ad, we see that Maggi has handpicked two traditional ‘breakfast’ which are comfort foods, for this offering. Viewers couldn’t help but wonder how appropriate the product is, as lockdowns give birth to a lot of ‘home chefs’ who take the time and effort to prepare their meals and some who have got no other options but to cook by themselves.
Vidur Vyas, CEO, NorthSide, a strategy, and execution company, said “Over the years, Maggi has built itself in the noodle format and added fun to the hunger occasions. Being a strong and popular brand, it is good to see Maggi return to its core and widen to other locally compatible food formats in packaging, instructions for the usage, and advertising execution which is very close to brand equity.”
Vidur Vyas added that the execution and the visual language will tempt buyers to try the brand. However, Vyas also mentions that what remains is whether the product’s taste is up to the taste expectations from Maggi and whether it can extend its brand to older groups.