According to GCMMF's manager, marketing, Jayen S Mehta: ``This market is witnessing difficult times due to high imports of refined oils like palmolein, sunflower and soyabean oils. The low international prices coupled with low import duty has adversely affected the domestic industry-both producers and processors. As a result, the producers get a low price for their output since the prices are depressed due to adulteration with low price variants and the consumers get cheated due to inferior quality of adulterated oil generally available in the market.''

The campaign will therefore, highlight the superior quality of Dhara Double Filtered Groundnut Oil. Says Mehta: ``The entire processing and packing is done in-house by the NDDB.'' The seeds are procured by the cooperatives, crushed in their own plants, packed in their own packing stations and finally, made available to the consumer after stringent quality checks. Mehta claims, this is unlike other players who buy the groundnut oil from the market (which is usually adulterated), pack it and sell it.

The base-line of the ad thus is: ``Our Cooperatives, Our Seeds, Our Mills, Our Packs, Your Oil.'' With the ad-line, ``Dhara, Dhara Shudh Dhara'' and ``Anokhi shudhta, anokha asar,'' the present campaign on television addresses only the purity aspect of Dhara. According to Mudra Communications general manager Jagdish Acharya who is handling the Dhara account: ``The new campaign evolves from the purity aspect. But it goes a step further. The fact that even as people have moved from loose to branded oil for purity and safety purpose, they are not really buying pure groundnut oil. Unless it is Dhara, because here the entire processing is done indigenously.''

The campaign will be released in the leading newspapers of Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra. Though Dhara has been in the print medium on and off in the past, this is the first time that the campaign is going solely in the print medium.

GCMMF is the sole selling agent for the Dhara range of edible oils, a brand owned by the National Dairy Development Board. Dhara is India's largest selling brand of edible oils with the following variants: Dhara Double Filtered Groundnut Oil; Dhara Double Filtered Mustard Oil; Dhara Refined Vegetable Oil; Dhara Health Refined Sunflower Oil; Dhara Refined Soyabean Oil; Dhara Refined Cottonseed Oil; Dhara Kachi Ghani Mustard Oil.