Brands move to give Asian consumers the faster food they want

Home cooking remains important – sharing family meals made with fresh ingredients is a strongly rooted part of the culture – but with life getting busier and more women entering work, the time available to prepare complicated meals from scratch is limited. Global brands are recognising that the growing middle class has greater purchasing power to buy their products, and are looking for added benefits which, like convenience, will enhance their lives rather than meeting a basic need.

Local brands have the ‘home advantage’ when it comes to understanding and responding to what consumers in their country want. They are also highly attuned to the marketing messages, channels and style of advertising that will resonate with audiences.

This local knowledge can bring huge success. In China, Master Kong – master of convenience with its instant noodles, drinks, biscuits and ready-to-drink tea – is bought by consumers more than one billion times a year, according to Kantar Worldpanel’s Brand Footprint ranking. Through successfully targeting the middle class, it has been able to increase its prices.

Tailoring flavours to the local palate is crucial, and local brands are exceptionally good at this. People in Indonesia prefer instant noodles with a strong flavour, for example – including chicken curry, onion and Chicken Soto, a traditional chicken soup. Market leader Indomie Mi Goreng and its biggest competitor, Mie Sedaap, are bought more than a billion times a year, despite only being present in one market.

Global food brands Maggi and Knorr, which produce instant soups, stocks and sauces, taste enhancers and noodles, are achieving growth in Asia by reacting to cultural differences and spending time understanding local consumers’ needs and habits. Their products make the cooking process quicker and easier, addressing the need for convenience, while keeping the home-cooked flavour.

Both are riding very high in Kantar Worldpanel’s global Brand Footprint ranking of the most chosen brands in the world, which combines penetration (the number of households buying it) with frequency of purchase. Number one food brand Maggi is bought by 23% of households in Asia, and the largest proportion of its growth in reach over the last year came from the region, helped by launches such as liquid seasoning in China and low fat noodles in Malaysia. Knorr, which is purchased by 10% of households in Asia, produces local flavours for its instant soups, including stewbone in Vietnam.

By offering recipes in their packaging and on social media, these brands show consumers how to integrate their products into home-made meals – and they’ve also started featuring celebrity chefs in their marketing.

Powdered drinks brand Tang – the fourth biggest beverage brand in the world – also excels at local focus. Fruit juice in powdered format is cheap and convenient: It can be stored in the cupboard, and ‘one glass’ sachets and sticks makes the drink very portable. Tang has grown by developing a variety of flavours to suit local preferences, and targeting its marketing. Inspired by research that showed mothers in China wanted their kids to drink more water, while children found it ‘boring’ and ‘bland’, it successfully rejuvenated its brand in the country with its ‘Tang makes water more exciting’ campaign.

Freshness and ‘real’ taste is very important in many Asian countries. In rural areas in particular people don’t tend to store food; they open the package and eat it quickly. The big competition for convenience food brands is ready-to-eat street food, which people buy from stalls. Freshly squeezed juice, which people can buy in supermarkets and on the street, is also a huge market.

Brands that get as close as possible to the real flavour and use natural ingredients – and communicate this in a compelling way – can create competitive advantage. Knorr heavily promotes the fact that its stock cubes contain 11 different real vegetables in its marketing while Masako, one of the biggest producers of seasoning in Indonesia, advertises its use of real beef, fish, chicken and vegetable extract.

This love of freshness points to an opportunity for brands to introduce products like liquid stocks and ‘fresh’ ready meals into Asia. These categories are not currently well developed, but with the right marketing – emphasizing the benefits of freshness and authentic flavours – they can engage consumers who increasingly have the money to spend on these more expensive formats.

They will fail if they impose their own culture or take a one-size-fits all approach to marketing communications, however – the style and the message need to be as tightly tailored to the market as the products. In China, for instance, where ‘saving face’ is important, a campaign that reassures the shopper that “only you will know you didn’t prepare everything from scratch” may appeal, whereas in Thailand it could be a message about the freshness of the ingredients.

Global brands that are launching the same products across a number of markets must get as close to the intimacy that local brands have with shoppers as possible – learning about and reacting to cultural differences by adapting their products and marketing communications. 

Virginia Garavaglia is marketing director, Asia with Kantar Worldpanel.