12 August 2010 Media 21

“Reach for advertising that is more meaningful”l Dani Comar in Private View, page 26 ANALYSIS 5

Analyst comment

“Unilever is the clear leader in ice cream sales in Indonesia, but it’s not resting on its laurels. The company is pushing beyond conventional marketing and launching innovative initiatives to entice ice cream lovers.

Moving away from traditional TV and billboard advertisements, Unilever is using modern digital technologies. As an Indonesian first and as part of a global initiative, the company rolled out two animated movies — Paddle Pop Pyrata and Paddle Pop Kombatei — that seek to inspire young children with the values of courage, adventure, and cooperation. Unilever has extended this content with interactive online games and DVDs.

For Unilever, the result is pester-power, which plays a significant role in impulse purchases. Elsewhere, Unilever is adapting to evolving media. Indonesia ranks as the third largest country globally for Facebook accounts, and Unilever has established a Facebook presence to foster discussion of Unilever’s products to inform the youth and young-adult segments of its new ice cream flavours and innovations.

Unilever’s Facebook community is built on top of its existing community of consumers on Friendster/Twitter. Such social networking efforts are complemented by websites. For example, www.icecreamoflove.com, which likewise bolsters brand presence through the emotional draw of social events and life experiences.

Mothers are not left out in the cold, and Unilever lets them air their views at www.mamamootemanmoo.com, completing a comprehensive arc of modern-day communications — all of which is dedicated to ice cream.”

its recently launched Swirls ice cream counters. It seems to be paying off. Euromonitor found that Wall’s’ market share grew to 51.2 per cent in 2008 from 44.9 per cent in 2004, while Campina simply held share at 20 per cent.

Value and volume of ice cream market in Indonesia

Source: Nielsen

0

10,000,000

8,000,000

6,000,000

4,000,000

2,000,000

2007 2008 2009

192,074

5,820,060

6,947,503

8,739,657

269,108 353,584

Value (million Rp)Volume (L)

Indonesia’s neighbours are gluttons when it comes to ice cream. New Zealand has the world’s highest per capita con-

sumption — 28.4 litres annually — while Australia weighs in third at 18 litres, and equatorial Singa-pore wears the crown as Asia’s ice cream leader with 2.4 litres.

Indonesia, in contrast, prob-ably has the lowest. Yet Unilever, marketers of Wall’s ice cream, sees the country as the next hot spot for frozen desserts and, by investing in product develop-ment, promotion and distribu-tion, the multinational appears to be single-handedly growing the market.

Last year, according to Nielsen Indonesia, ATL advertising for ice cream totalled Rp288.5 billion (US$27.7 million), and Unilever was dominant, spend-ing Rp269.5 billion, more than 90 per cent of the category on its Wall’s brand. Eight of Unilever Indonesia’s 16 flavours were pro-moted last year, including Cor-netto (Rp67.8 billion), Paddle Pop (Rp60.5 billion) and Moo’s Active (Rp45.5 billion). Each ice cream Unilever promoted had an ATL budget larger than the total budget of Wall’s’ biggest rival — Indonesia’s Campina.

Nearly all of the remaining adspend came from Campina (Rp14.2 billion). It advertised its brands Avatar and Baby Concer-to, as well as ice cream cakes.

Two other major ice cream makers, Indolakto and Dia-mond Cold Storage barely spent a rupiah. Nor did Häagen-Dazs, Baskin-Robbins, New Zealand Natural or any of the other inter-national ice cream parlours that dot Jakarta’s affluent shopping malls.

Unilever has big plans for Indo-nesia. But the country’s per cap-

Despite having one of Asia’s lowest per capita incomes, Indonesia is a target for Unilever’s ice creams. By Glenn SmithUnilever hopes that Indonesians will take to Wall’s

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Wall’s Cornetto... top 2009 adspend Campina... just a 20 per cent share

ita income is $599.24, one of the lowest in Asia, and 32.3 per cent goes to the top one per cent.

“Big tubs of ice cream for the home are out of reach for most Indonesians,” says Debnath Gu-haroy, regional director, Asia for Roy Morgan Research. “This is why penetration is static at around 10 per cent, even though volumes may be growing via af-fluent homes.”

Euromonitor estimates Indo-nesians consumed 85.2 million litres of ice cream last year, a mi-nuscule 0.35 litres for each of the archipelago’s 243 million people. Yet even that consumption level marked a great leap forward — 34.2 per cent— from the 63.5 mil-lion litres consumed in 2004.

Significantly, value sales grew at double that rate last year com-pared to 2004 sales.

“Ice cream is growing faster than other food and beverage products sold through modern retail,” says Teguh Yunanto, executive director, retail meas-urement, Nielsen Indonesia. “Nielsen’s home panel, con-ducted in Indonesia’s five major cities: Jakarta, Bandung, Sura-bya, Semarang and Medan, shows that less than 70 per cent of households buy ice cream. Those that do, purchase it about 10 times a year.”

According to Yunanto, trade is approximately 10 to 15 per cent of the total grocery category. That means that nearly four fifths of sales come from smaller cities and rural areas. Yet, in these dis-tricts incomes plummet, as does the penetration rate of house-hold refrigerators, which is 20 per cent in Indonesia, according to one regional survey. This is com-pared to 40 per cent for the Phil-ippines and China, 80 per cent in Thailand, and more than 90 per cent in the rest of Asia.

Euromonitor reports that one third of national ice cream sales are single-serving, impulse pur-

chases from vendors cruising residential areas on bicycles.

That is yet another channel that Unilever is developing for its Wall’s ice cream, covering this lower than average price point, while offering pricier variants through retail outlets, and flirt-ing with the upper end by taking the Wall’s brand into malls at

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2009Wall’sMiniCornetto 67,800Wall’sPaddlePop 60,468Wall’sMooActive 45,474Wall’sCornettoRoyale 33,281Wall’sCornetto 28,504Wall’s 15,362Wall’s3in1 13,554Campina 6,243CampinaAvatar 5,672Wall’sViennetta 4,554Source:NielsenMediaResearch

Ice cream brand adspend in Indonesia (Rp. m)