Orajolt - Rasna's Failure...

Pioma’s Rasna is even today one of the top selling brands in India but it hasn’t had much success when it has tried to venture out of its comfort zone.

Oranjolt was a fizzy fruit drink Pioma came up with as an innovation. Oranjolt was a failure even before it could take off. It is often referred to as “The drink that lost its cool” (Ref - Matt Haig - Brand Failures: The Truth About the 100 Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time).

The packing and the pricing of this product was pretty good. It was available in a 1.5 liter Pet bottle with attractive packing at a competitive price. In spite of all this, the product failed and some of the reasons are mentioned below:

Storage problem resulting in Quality issues:

Oranjolt was a fruit drink in which carbonation was used as a preservative. To last, it needed to be refrigerated. The problem was that Indian retailers tend to switch off their shop refrigerators at night. As a result, Oranjolt faced quality problems and the products would have to be discarded.

Low Shelf Life:

The product had a shelf life of three to four weeks where as other soft drinks were assured a shelf life of over five months. This meant that whenever the products were brought in, they would have to be consumed right away and this in many ways was a loss to the retailer and if sold to the consumer could cause many issues.

Servicing and Distribution:

Servicing outlets was also a problem. The low shelf life mentioned above meant that the product needed to be replaced with new stock every three to four weeks. Even Coke and Pepsi make replacements only once in three months. Hence replacing Oranjolt within the stipulated period of time was a difficult task and the company claims to not have the resources to cover all the areas that they had distributed to.

Oranjolt was therefore launched in select outlets and could not expand rapidly.

It is obvious that Rasna failed to anticipate the quality problems it faced and this shows that it had not done an in depth product and market analysis before launching the product.

Also research on the distribution and replenishment was lacking and it could be said that they were probably still in the Rasna mindset.

Pioma, already having a very strong product, Rasna, in hand, assumed that they would not have a lot many problems in the distribution. They probably failed to see the difference in the two products and hence did not foresee the quality and distribution issues. Oranjolt is said to have gone into the company’s R&D department so that it could be bettered. The product has not yet been relaunched.

The Rasna brand is so strong that Oranjolt could not do any harm to it. Besides it was just an innovation tried out by the company. Even after Oranjolt, Pioma has launched many other products which have been a success. Some of them being Utsav and Fruitplus.