Nostalgia, bottled and brought back: Reliance rolls out the Campa crates

While Reliance hopes the gamble on the brand's popularity in the 1970s will pay off, experts feel it may not connect with the millennials, who are the major consumers of aerated drinks today

Picture this: A lanky young Salman Khan lounging on the guard rails of a leisure boat surrounded by young twenty-somethings decked in beachwear, crooning in English, frolicking in the sand and sea. Appearing on your TV screens in the late 70s and early 80s, this advertisement for Campa Cola was an image of extravagance, modernity, even global ambitions. And it clearly aimed to entice the youth. The ad’s accompanying jingle repeatedly drove home brand’s then-tagline: “There’s more to life with Campa Cola.”

George Fernandes, the union minister for industry in the 1977 Morarji Desai government, had decided to throw Coca Cola out of India over its refusal to follow the provision of what was then the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA). The Janta government’s attempt to replace Coke with what came to be known as “the sarkari cola” — officially called Double Seven after the year marking the end of Emergency — had failed to capture the market or the imagination of Indian consumers. It was now that Pure Drinks India, which had been manufacturing and distributing Coca Cola in India since 1949, began producing Campa.

Campa, which many brand experts have termed as an “imitation brand,” was designed to replicate and replace Coke. With a similar look of the brand name and logo, similar packaging and even an identical formula, the product was marked to replace coke not just in content but also spirit. The Salman-Khan ad did just that; coupled with print ad slogans like “Life is full of Campa Cola times.” Another showed the bottle being uncorked and said: “It’s time for an extra twist of fate.”

Campa’s most iconic slogan came a little later though: “The Great Indian Taste”. This triumphant correlation of Campa with a universal Indian “taste” might seem premature now, given the brand’s rapid downfall when the foreign cola brands were allowed back into the Indian markets in 1990.

However, Campa’s immense presence in the India can only be gauged by its pop culture presence.

Indian cinema and music are littered with references of Campa and its popular, orange-flavoured variant. Keeping true to the masala movie’s male-gaze, Bhojpuri and Hindi songs have used everything from the drink’s peppy flavour to the shape of the Campa Cola bottle to allegorise desirable physicality.

However, the most recent, and prominent reference to Campa comes in the film Photograph (2019), where Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s lead character, Rafi, embarks on a journey to find a desolate Campa Cola factory that might let him buy one of the impossible-to-find soft drink that is off the shelves, for his companion Miloni, played by Sanya Malhotra. Miloni’s fond memories of drinking Campa with her grandfather adds another complex layer of nostalgia to the fizzy drink.  Rafi finally finds the cola with an old Parsi man who had also set up a Campa Cola factory in the memory of his wife. In the film then, the much-beloved cola is elevated beyond a mere plot trope and rather a character in its own sense.

It is this sense of nostalgia that Reliance hopes to bank on as it relaunches the iconic drink. However, Samit Sinha, managing partner at Alchemist Brand Consulting points out there might be a fundamental challenge in this strategy.

“Firstly, Campa Cola is an unfamiliar name for millennials in India, who constitute the bulk of the consumers of carbonated beverages today. While Campa Cola may evoke nostalgia for those born in the 1970s and earlier, it would have no association whatsoever for the generations that came after.” He believes the cola has to now carve out its own niche against formidable foreign brands, in a completely changed market.