Pitching the Liva effect: Know Birla Cellulose's approach towards branding

How often does one buy clothes for an ingredient rather than the label it wears? Hardly ever, is the most likely answer and yet Birla Cellulose is doing just that. It is branding viscose, a commonly used fibre that goes into garments made by brands such as Biba, Allen Solly, Van Heusen, Shoppers Stop, FBB and Pantaloons among others. In a campaign reminiscent of the iconic 1991 Intel Inside series of ads, the company talks about fluidity of garments that use Liva and urges customers to ask for it at retail stores. 

The company signed Kangana Ranaut as brand ambassador some time back for its campaign in print. It is now pushing forward with TV commercials and strategic brand alliances, hoping to leverage the interest generated by its celebrity endorser to create greater awareness and recall at points of purchase. 

The company hopes that its campaign will steer interest towards what goes inside a fashion brand and customers will be enthused enough to seek out clothes with Liva-inside. This would help position the fibre as a premium product in a highly commoditised space. 

“A fibre company working with consumers is not easy. But we believe that consumers know what they like and we must understand that and deliver more value. Our research found that we have a unique property called fluidity and that consumers like clothes that are natural and fashionable. So we came up with the tagline ‘natural fluid fashion’,” says Manohar Samuel, president (marketing) at Birla Cellulose.

Ingredient branding is tricky but has proven to be highly effective for brands such as Intel, Teflon and a few American brands in the auto industry. The ‘Intel Inside’ campaign managed to educate retail sales associates and consumers about the value of Intel microprocessors without the technical jargon. 

Birla Cellulose wants to make Liva a familiar name, de-jargonise the product in a way that Intel’s campaign did, for customers and retailers. This has not been attempted before in India where textile brands have used fabric as a differentiator more commonly, citing the superiority of linen, silk and cotton used in their products. Fibre and yarn are categorised as unbranded commodities and have been treated as such. 

“In the space of textiles and apparel, one seems to have hit a dead end in terms of creativity or ability to script a story. Hence, such a campaign was inevitable,” says Harish Bijoor, CEO of Bengaluru-based Harish Bijoor Consults. The company has hired Lowe Lintas for the campaign to showcase viscose as the new-age fabric designed to instill fluidity into garments. A television commercial (TVC) around the campaign is also on air where a lifeless fabric comes alive when injected with Liva viscose. “The vision is to provide Indian consumers a choice of fabric, which can allow them to dress fashionably and yet be comfortable.

Also this brand promises fluidity, this comes out alive, much better in a moving medium than in a print medium, so I think it’s a natural progression for the brand to now move from print to television,” says Rajeev Gopal, CMO, Birla Cellulose. The TVC was challenging in terms of communicating several aspects of the ingredient while ensuring it ended up as a fashion film, said Deepa Geethakrishnan, national creative director, Lowe Lintas. 

Bijoor says that while the campaign does make Liva appealing to consumers as an ingredient, the company should have chosen a more specific attribute for a greater direct connect. “It is an interesting campaign in the textiles space. If, however, it were to say that ‘I am 100 per cent organic’, or ‘I am what allows your fabric to breathe’, it could garner greater appeal,” says Bijoor.

To further engage with the consumers, Birla Cellulose has also entered into co-branding partnerships with 34 brands. The list includes brands like Biba, Allen Solly, Van Heusen, Shoppers Stop, FBB and Pantaloons. “We also have a Liva accredited partner forum to supply the fabric. The two partnerships help us in backward integration and traceability to ensure quality products reach our consumers,” says Samuel. 

The company is also building an online presence. “We are present in 4,000 stores across 180 cities through our ingredient brand. No other single brand could have had such a presence. Today we are about 12 million garments with Liva hand tags and we hope to grow by 25-30 per cent. We are getting new growth through applications across categories while also setting up branded e-stores on portals like ABOF,” Samuel adds.

According to Samuel, Birla Cellulose has seen significant growth for its brand in a number of categories. In the coming months, he says the list of brands and categories will get longer.