``While the year 2000 was spent in advancing distribution and availability at the retail level, the year 2001 would mainly involve intense advertising, supported by below-the-line ground level activity,'' Mr Abhay Manglik, country director, Tropicana India told The Financial Express while outlining the marketing plan for the brand.

While refusing to divulge the total ad budget earmarked for the brand, Mr Manglik promised that in absolute terms, the spend would double to about 20 per cent of its total sales. As part of the strategy, the company will leverage consumer pull more extensively because the brand has apparently shown high stickiness. ``We've to get people to the product,'' adds Mr Manglik. The company plans to offer incentives to customers to generate larger number of trials and aggravate trials via institutions, schools and hospitals to widen its consumer base.

The company is also toying with the idea of adding two new flavours which would appease the Indian palette, this year. Tomato would be one of them.

``We're currently identifying flavours which consumers in India would prefer,'' Mr Manglik said. Towards that, the company has just introduced a `sweet orange' flavour specificaly for the Indian consumers who found the regular Tropicana orange flavour `bitter'.

Currently, Tropicana markets five flavours-orange, apple, sweet orange, pineapple and grape in India in packs of 1 litre and 250-ml packs in tetrapack and aseptic tetrabrik. To make its packaging more upscale, Tropicana would also be changing its 250ml-pack figuration from the current baseline to slim line.

Present in India since 1988, Tropicana has been a slow mover. According to Mr Manglik, this was because the company opted for a selective distribution strategy. In fact, Mr Manglik claims that limited distribution and tight management of inventory have been the cornerstone of Tropicana's reasonable success.

While Tropicana will continue its `controlled distribution strategy' in 2001, it plans to increase it further by about 20 per cent this year.

The Rs 100-crore natural juice market was, till last year, dominated by Enkay Texofoods' Onjus brand which has gone through rough weather lately.

The other major player is Dabur Foods' Real brand which is currently the market leader with a 55 per cent marketshare. However, Tropicana, claims it's neck-in-neck with Real with a marketshare of 60 per cent in 17 cities.

According to Mr Manglik, its new initiatives should result in about 40-45 per cent growth in Tropicana's volumes this year. A cut in the excise duty announced in Budget 2001-02 should help. However, Mr Manglik feels the excise cut will result in only 10 per cent volume growth since the import duty on the basic product is still high at 38 per cent.

The organised natural juice market is currently at its nascent stage with high price being one of the major obstacles to its growth. While Tropicana is priced at Rs 68 for a 1 litre pack, Real is priced at Rs 65.