Center Fresh, the flagship gum and mints brand of Perfetti Van Melle India, announced the launch of its new ‘Aage Badh’ campaign, featuring Varun Dhawan as its brand ambassador. 

This new chapter for Center Fresh aims to inspire young individuals to embrace a forward-looking attitude and overcome life's small everyday setbacks with a new perspective.

In an exclusive conversation e4m, Gunjan Khetan, CMO-India, Perfetti Van Melle India (PVMI) shared, “Center Fresh is a youth brand and we have always focused on the cultural nuances of the youth of India and that's been a history of the brand for the last 30 years, that is why we have always come up with campaigns that have been intriguing, quirky, funny and engaging and in the spirit of that, we have worked very closely with Gen-Z of today to understand what drives them, what motivates them, what holds them back.”

That is also where the brand got the insight that the youth of today want to move forward, want to accomplish more, and want to reach their fullest potential. They don't want to be held back by anything, they don't want stress over matters that hold them back. Therein came the campaign’s insight of moving on and enabling people to take a fresh perspective on things.

According to him, Dhawan was the right fit for the messaging of this campaign because he connects very well with the audiences in India, both in urban as well as in rural, and is very well known. Dhawan is a person who reflects the personality of the brand since he brings fresh perspectives, he is very energetic, cool, stylish, and these are all the things that the brand stands for.

It is also a trend for Perfetti to use humour as a route for their most campaigns which helps in a strong brand recall and builds a long-lasting reputation. Case in point, ‘Dimaag ki batti jala de’, ‘Kaisi Jeebh Laplapayee’, ‘Zubaan pe rakhe lagaam’ and more.

Khetan thinks that most of the profiting brands have been built on a rich understanding of India and its culture and most of the taglines that you remember are essentially colloquial terms and Perfetti has used some of these colloquial terms looking at the personality of the brand, the benefit of the brand and tried to integrate it.

He added, “Humour isn’t the best route but considering the category we are in which is mostly impulse, we have to be top of mind all the time and one of the best ways to do that is to create communication that is engaging, that is memorable and therefore in some cases also has had shock value, so to that extent, humour as a way of storytelling works very well.”

Elaborating on the marketing mix that PVMI follows,  Khetan revealed that from the lens of Center Fresh, it is a youth brand and youth is as much on TV as it is on digital. The brand spends on TV because TV still is the best and the most efficient way to reach mass audience irrespective of the age group. Further, digital helps the brand build incremental reach, especially with the OTG which is the youth of India because that is where they sit.

“We also look at other ways of building impact, so it's out of home or it's metro branding, a healthy mix works for us. A large part of our business also comes from rural since PVMI is one of the best-distributed FMCG companies in India and we reach close to about five and a half million outlets across urban and rural. Hence, we also do a lot of awareness and visibility activity in rural areas via bus stand branding and more,” said the CMO.

Coming to the top trends that the executive notices in the mints and candy segment, Khetan explained people like to experiment a lot nowadays. “Things like tangy products are coming through and new categories are gaining a lot of traction. We play in a category called jellies which is doing very well and it's outpacing most of the other confectioning categories,” he said.

Center Fresh and Gums is not a category that is skewed towards the festive season because of the nature of the category. PVMI has certain categories in indulgence that tend to do better during the festive season and they over-invest in those categories during the festive season with the most visibility in retail and store activations. 

Khetan highlighted they also bet heavily on Halloween because they believe it's an emerging trend in India and is getting traction.

“Halloween is getting amazingly popular in India and we see an outcome of that because Chupa as a brand tends to over-invest in Halloween and we have sold millions of bags of Chupa during that period,” said Khetan. The next 3-4 months are going to be busy for Perfetti and they are quite positive in their outlook for the next few months.