Branding is like raising a child. Amar Sinha, COO, Radico Khaitan, one of the leading liquor companies in India, takes a lot of patience, care, and effort to make it grow over the years.
Radico Khaitan was one of 500 Indian companies honored at the Inauguration Ceremony of the Pride of India Brand Awards, presented by the exchange4media team.
The Pride of India Brand Awards honors the best of Bharat and the world-class Make in India companies it produces.
Radico Khaitan started operations as Rampur Distillery, dating back to pre-independence India. It was purchased in 1972 for Rs 16 lakh by Dr. Lalit Khaitan and has produced spirits and base liquors for some of the biggest liquor brands in the world.
Dr. Khaitan’s son Abhishek Khaitan joined the family business in 1997 and it was then that the father-son duo invited Amar Sinha, Shaw Wallace’s former vice president of sales, to join the management team. Since then, the company has not looked back.
The name “Radico Khaitan” was coined in 1999 by Rampur (Ra) Distillery (Di) Company (Co) when the owner wanted to switch from a merchandising business to a branded business. Another impetus for the name change was to give the company a more contemporary and international appeal.
Today, the company is listed in Fortune India magazine’s list of the world’s top 500 companies. Sinha recalls Radico’s first campaign for the company’s first in-house brand, 8 PM, in 1998. “We launched it with a TVC, which was a huge success.
Not only did the product become an instant hit, but advertising, which shows that even enemies become friends when the clock hits eight, has had a huge impact in the advertising industry. He won many major public awards and was nominated for the Lion of Cannes that year.
The campaign appears to have been a success, with 8 PM selling a record 1 million units in its first year of launch, a record that no other brand in India has yet broken. TVC 8 PM itself was ranked by industry publications in the 100 best commercials of the century at the time.
Continuing this market-centric approach, Radico has been able to establish more than 15 profitable brands, including segment leaders such as Magic Moments and Morpheus brandy, organically over the decade the past century have been successful in their respective categories, and have close cooperation present in more than 90 countries.
“Over the past few weeks, we’ve launched two super-premium brands and run several campaigns across platforms ranging from store to digital. People are responding very well,” said Sinha, who acknowledges that digital is becoming the dominant way for Radico to have been very proactive in marketing its products over the years, through various mediums.
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