Painting the long game: Asian Paints and its successful SEA penetration
~ Jasmeet Saluja, International Marketing Manager @ Asian Paints
Indonesia is an archipelago comprising over 17,000 islands, with five main islands: Java, Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, and Papua. It is characterized by diverse landscapes, including tropical rainforests, mountains, and coastal plains.
Indonesia experiences a tropical climate marked by high humidity and temperatures averaging 28°C (82°F) year-round. The country has two distinct seasons: the dry season (May-September) and the wet season (October-April).
The infrastructure is highly stressed due to frequent earthquakes and extreme weather conditions. This is in combination with a typical pattern of the Indonesian population where Indonesian homeowners are so keen on having a clean and beautiful house that some say they paint their homes every year, making Indonesia a very lucrative market for paint companies.
Hence, Indonesia stands to be one of the most cluttered markets, with more than 120+ registered paint companies. Top competition brands include renowned global brands – Jotun, Dulux, Nippon, etc., and well-known local brands like Avian, Propan, etc.
The Problem Statement
Given that Indonesia is among the top 5 nations with the highest rainfall, waterproofing has become ultra-important for paint companies. The Indonesian waterproofing market is dominated by organized waterproofing players such as Nodrop, Aquaproof, and Elastex (these three combined occupy the maximum share of the retail waterproofing market).
We at Asian Paints evaluated the promises made vs the actual performance of some paint brands. Moreover, in-depth consumer research across major islands of Indonesia helped us identify the gaps in the market that any brand was not catering to.
These included:
Shade availability: Indonesians (especially women) have a detailed eye on colors. They are very peculiar about the shades chosen for their house's painting. The shades are not limited to a color family, but the entire spectrum needs to be available.
Performance: While repainting every year has been a habit, this largely stems from the fact that most paints show water problems in the interior, like seepage, leakage, bubbling, efflorescence, etc. Hence, they need paint that protects their interiors from heavy rains and provides a reliable long-term solution.
Pricing: While a high-performance product was required, the budget should not burn a hole in customers' pockets. A very high value-for-money solution was sought.
Solution
With a ton of back and forth with R&D, rounds of market trials, and User Acceptance Testing (UAT) with tens of painters, we built a product that bundles all the market insights in one brand & is relatable to the customers simultaneously. We introduced our waterproofing brand, ' Bocor Guard’ (Bocor in Bahasa means dampness/leakage).
Bocor Guard was launched across our dealer network and contractor community — a massive launch across major islands in Indonesia, creating hype and strengthening the channel.
Several BTL (Below the Line) activities supported this:
Demo Tools/POSM (Point Of Sales Materials)
OTC Scheme (Over-The-Counter payments)
The Hurdle: Offline vs Online Marketing
While we successfully placed our stocks in stores, our incremental growth over the quarter was bleak. Our sales plateaued month on month despite positive feedback from the dealer network & contractor community. One of the core reasons for this was extensive marketing from cash-rich competition brands still pumping money on traditional mediums – TVC, OOH, & Radio.
We are a challenger paint brand in Indonesia focusing on profitable sales growth. This is where we realized that BTL was insufficient and needed a massier medium to reach our customers. Moreover, if we engaged our competition by fighting the battle on their turf (on traditional offline channels), we would not stand a chance, given we were the challenger brand without much cash to back us up.
Discovering that Indonesia is among the highest content-consuming nations gave us the confidence that digital would be our route. This was easier said than done since local legacy brands had already taken that space over the years.
One of these brands, ‘No Drop,’ even had a jingle – ‘No Bocor Bocor' – that became a household tagline with high recall.
(Bocor means dampness/leakage on walls. This is the outcome of rain, which enters the weak walls and cracks that develop over time or is due to poor construction practices.)
The Eureka Moment
Indonesians have different names for different kinds of rain:
Hujan Angin – Rain storms
Hujan Badai – Heavy rains
Hujan Petir – Thunderstorms
And so on…
We found our eureka moment in the rain - the biggest culprit of leakage/dampness issues. While our competition hinged on problems in their brand communication, we focused on the source itself. While they captured ‘bocor’ in their tagline, which holds a negative connotation, we harped upon ‘Hujan,’ a positive and cheerful association.
We then came up with ‘Pelindung Dari Segala Hujan,’ which means protection from all kinds of rains.
And since rain does not have any negative connotation, as bocor does, we went ahead and metaphorically owned rain so that when people think of rain, they think of the Bocor Guard.
We even made commercials along these lines:
And the impact of this campaign was great. With the objective of bringing awareness to our users, we reached a staggering 80 million individuals. They were exposed to our ad campaigns 3.5 times on average per user. We also doubled our sales volume for the quarter in which this campaign was run.
Picking up the campaign's success, we further established the association of rain for everything – introducing metaphorical rain references from one’s daily life.
We launched a UGC campaign on Instagram and invited our customers to share their preferred kind of rain using the Asian Paints Bocor Guard Filter.
The Reception
And we received a phenomenal response without much marketing – about 1000 entries without spending a single buck.
In parallel, we identified the most viral influencers (not necessarily from our line of business). We asked them to create content for us (largely humor, as humor is the most sought-after content in Indonesia).
Check them out here:
This was supported by ongoing social media campaigns with regular posts on our social media handles. The content was designed not just to sell products but equally focused on engagement: riddles, educational content, moment marketing, etc.
Learnings & The Way Forward
The campaign was a success; we reached our targets earlier than expected and spent less than expected.
But we also realized a few misfires along the way. Here are some of our learnings:
We did not have one big common hook for the customers to attach to the brand; from all kinds of rain to metaphorical rain to influencer content to numerous other content on our handle – customers did not have 1 point to latch on to the brand.
Association with metaphorical rain was innovative but did not bring the recall back to the brand. In fact, it often diluted the other efforts.
Once we had these realizations, we started building our basics back:
We built on the brand's core proposition, protection from all kinds of rain – literal rain.
We saw the opportunity to club interior and exterior paint and used our hero interior product to piggyback on:
We focused on promoting this with our internal teams as well, with sales contests and weekly bonanzas:
Result?
With concentrated effort, we’ve built Bocor Guard as the biggest waterproofing brand for Asian Paints in Indonesia — a sustainable brand with a substantial recall in the network. A testament to this is the reaction of our competition. Our competition was forced to up their digital game and launch flanking products to cut down on Bocor Guard.
No Drop launched a new variant, No Drop Basic, in an attempt to safeguard its core brand, No Drop, from Bocor Guard.
The Conclusion
The key takeaway is that no matter how big or small a player you are or how big or small your marketing budget is if you need to crack the market, you must start identifying untapped areas and innovating to make the most of them.
The deeper you know your audience and what they want, the faster you grow your business and increase your revenue!
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