Getting favors by focusing on single men in advertisements following the food safety scratches, Nestlé is now wooing ‘worried moms’ ahead of the return of Maggi to India.
To regain lost customers, the company posted a series of online ads on YouTube on Wednesday. Actress moms in these ads confront fears about the 2-Minute Noodles while talking about the guilt they felt for feeding their children the product.
“My mother fed me Maggi as a child. And I’ve also fed Maggi to my children. Were both mothers wrong?” one woman asks in the first of Nestlé’s three online spots, two of which are focused on Indian mothers and their bond with the noodles.
While maintaining that its noodles were safe to eat and that its own tests hadn’t detected high-levels of lead, Nestlé pulled millions of the noodle packets from stores this year.
Later,Nestlé was cleared of the charge when court-ordered resting of the noodles failed to find lead or any other harmful ingredients.
On Wednesday the company said that the testers had passed the new noodle batches, paving the way for the return of the popular snack.
“I felt good. My mother and I, both, were right,” the woman in the first Nestlé spot concludes.
“Not just Maggi, I feel like I have passed a test too,” the concerned mother in Nestlé’s second commercial adds.
The commercials are part of a damage control campaign launched by Nestlé to regain consumer confidence in the wake of the food scare. Last month, the company published front-page ads in Indian newspapers, assuring consumers their noodles were safe to eat. And, in August, Nestle targeted at single men who couldn’t cook.
Senior executives at Nestlé’s Indian arm wouldn’t say how much the company plans to spend on ads to repair the damage done to its reputation, but say television commercials are in the works. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in July, Nestlé India’s newly-appointed managing director, Suresh Narayanan, said his immediate goal was to rebuild the company’s brand “brick by brick, consumer by consumer and employee by employee.”