Nigerian’s Tea drinking Habit Is On The Rise - Onubogu Drinking tea plays such a central part in human lives, it is such a universal phenomenon with millions of people the world over enjoying their tea on a daily basis, that it’s hard to imagine a world without tea and yet while the Eastern world has been using tea for more than 4500 years, for most of this time tea was unknown in the Western world. Tea was only introduced into the West a relatively recent 400 years ago. Discovered in China, tea has exerted a profound influence on societies and cultures throughout the world so that there are unique ceremonies in various cultures and most parts of the world have social etiquettes concerning the preparation and drinking of tea as well as social customs regarding how, when and where to drink it. Quenching African taste and passion for tea, Promasidor Nigeria Limited, makers of notable brands of tea, Top Tea recently launched four new variants of the tea into the Nigerian market. In this interview with Mr. Onyekachi Onubogu, Marketing Director, he spoke on the company’s efforts to inculcate the act of drinking more tea daily by consumers and new corporate projection of Promassidor in years to come. What’s your Overview of the Nigerian tea Market? We launched four variants of Top Tea recently: two variants, which are ginger and lemon/lime flavours, the black tea in the round pack as well as the black tea variant that is packed in an envelope with tags designed for hotels and people who want specialized brands. The tea market in Nigeria is very interesting and primarily dominated by Top Tea and the brand from Unilever. Top Tea is a brand that has been accepted by changing consumer habits. If you realized that about 10 or 15 years ago tea options depended on what you drink at that time. You ordeal was primarily hot beverages, coffee or tea. What has happened in these past years is that you have been given options that come in different packs and that have changed the conventional breakfast brand of hot beverage or coffee. So the market has consolidated but has not been growing as fast as other brands and categories. Because the market is dominated by key players, we decided to energize and excite it because what you see in the market historically has been a dull market and then you have a second player that came with Top Tea and we really brought dynamism into the market and we are trying to further grow presence in that market. But it is a market with potentials because aside what you know as tea that is in many markets in various parts of the world, tea has evolved much more than what you drink hot and also what you drink cold. It has also evolved to other segments like carbonated soft drinks so you have different variants like the Iced Tea drink, we have not gotten there yet in Nigeria but it’s something that is in the works. Well I must say that the best tea brand is the Top Tea brand, and I am not saying it because I work with Promasidor but because it’s a brand that is built on quality. First of all we get our tea leaves from the finest tea locations in the world and we have the best processing facilities so I think we have the best tea in the market and our recent launch has also lend credence to that because like I said at the launch we are the first indigenous tea company to roll out flavoured variants like these in the Nigerian market. I know some do have their flavoured variants in the market but most of them are imported. In terms of innovation, we are the first tea company to launch round bags and now we have the flavoured variants all to meet the consumer needs. What are the health benefits of tea? Our job is to let the people know the benefits of tea. As Nigerians we love our lives. So if I know something is good for me I will take. After all people drink agbo (local herb drink) without being told to do so because they believed that it’s good for their health. My challenge is to let people know the benefits of drinking tea. That it is more than drinking coke or cold water. If we all know that tea is good for our health and again people say that the Asian, Chinese live longer because they consume more tea and suffer less hypertension and again they live longer primarily because of the quantity of warm tea they consume and if we know that and communicate it to consumers that, there is a good chance that they will try it because everybody wants to live long. I challenge people to go and read up the benefits of drinking tea and if they do, they will drink more tea than you even dreamt of because we have those who want to lose weight, those whose food does not digest well or those who are worried about heart attack and tea in its real form, helps address these issues. If you read about the benefits of tea as an individual whether anybody convinces you or not, you will start drinking tea. Nigerians are very knowledgeable and discerning people and will do what is important if you give them the quality of life they want. Tea is not expensive. It is significantly cheaper than any other beverage you want, a pack of tea top tea for instance gives you 26 packs of tea for N110, if you drink one tea bag every six hours you can drink four tea bags divided by 26 and you can have it for one week and since one tea bag will make two cups, you can have eight cups of tea for ten days on a N110 because the only thing you mix with your tea is water. If you really want to take it what you need is hot water. In fact even if you don’t have hot water, the nutrient will come out. So for N110 that’s for a pack of Top Tea, it can give you eight mugs of tea for one week and that’s less than two bottles of coke. It is still the cheapest drink you can get because whether you are rich or not. That is what we need to do to tell people about the benefits and value of tea. In all our communication for Top Tea what we are driving are the benefits and values of tea so that people will know what tea is all about. That’s the biggest job we have to do in this category. N100 airtime how many minutes will you talk for before it finishes, but N100 tea will last you for one week and give you a better chance of having a better quality life. Is there a growing interest in tea drinking in Nigeria? Before we embark on any project, we do massive consumer research. We have quarterly massive consumer research also that analyses consumers trends and understands consumer trend. So every category has its own. And before we go into specific projects like this, we codes groups and consumers panel research to understand what the consumer wants and what the taste offering wants and when we develop tea before we launched it we tasted it with consumers to see if the taste meets the consumer needs because they might say they want ginger and the ginger may not be the same as they want some might say it’s too hard or small. Even in our research, there are other variants and tea options consumer wants of course we cant launch all of them in one day but we are gradually developing options. This is a journey we started in the next couple of years, we will change the face if tea in Nigeria. In terms of pack options, flavor based, delivery technology, we will change the entire face of the category in Nigeria. Because we can and we are not doing anything that can’t be done we are doing what must be done because that is what Nigerian consumers deserve. A lot of things have been done and a lot that we know consumers still want but if I ask you am sure that you will give me some tea that you have taken from somewhere maybe your aunt, mom or uncle we know all that and gradually we will take this brand to where it ought to be. We spend lots of money on research but I won’t give you the exact numbers because its confidential information but it is in the hundreds of millions. We spend a lot of money on research every year because it is the bedrock of our business. We launched TopTea recently and we have begun massive ATL activities to drive the brand. Over the next one or two months, you will see massive distribution gains for the brand. We launched it one week and I want to see what the results would be in one month time. We will also track our distribution gains so in about a month’s time I am sure you will see Top Tea in your neighborhood and again we have started lots of adverts on radio and TV. One thing that has grown up is the name. A lot of women like lemon tea in fact people like lemon tea in Nigeria the reason is that with lemon tea, you really don’t need milk it gives you the tea and also the flavor that goes well. Lemon and lime has their own benefits and taste. They give the taste that people like especially women so we are offering them their tea and lemon and lime with it. So that really helps and it has its own benefits. For ginger, we have the health benefit combining them with tea. Men like ginger because ginger has ‘strongness’ benefit. Ginger gives you lot of male potency. Ginger itself has lots of health benefit. But we are not counting the health benefit because at the end of the day, tea is still tea and that is what we are selling. What we are selling is Top Tea, the number one brand in Nigeria. What we did is to enhance not just giving you the benefit of tea but you also get the benefits of the other variants of tea. What are the challenges you encountered in the marketing of the existing Top Tea that you intend to leverage on for the new variants you have just introduced into the market? When we entered the Nigerian market, we encountered massive challenges because there was already an established market and we had to convince consumers that this brand we are offering was good enough for them to try. You need to build a product that is superior in terms of performance, superior in terms of taste, superior in terms of diffusion than what they already have in the tea bag market. Because consumers want a tea bag that when they put it in water it should diffuse well, has excellent quality, they want colour that’s the thickness of the original colour so they can make one or two cups from it. Our round tea bags can make two cups well, that is what we call thick. Our tea bag diffuses much faster and last much longer than the competition. So we needed to develop a product that will have an edge over the competition already in the market. But that has its own cost implication. But it was good because our vision in Promasidor is to constantly develop products that will meet the needs of consumers. Then there was distribution challenges, we are going against a company that has been in existence in Nigeria since colonial days and they have massive distribution networks and loyalties and goodwill with the Nigerian market and it had to change and to change that goodwill, you have to make your product available and make sure when consumers taste your products they are not disappointed and then keep pushing the product and keep spreading the message of consistency. Top quality is our watch word and that is what has driven Top Tea to where it is now and I guess my challenge will be to take a bag of Top Tea and take a bag of the other competitor and put it in the same mug of hot water and see how fast it diffuses and then taste it. Our brand is significantly better than the other. Given the low disposal income of consumers, do you think the tea market is growing? Your points are very valid because tea cuts across all the economic class so it’s not about where you come from. It now cuts across from the guy on the street to the man in the office, we all drink tea. What has happened now concerning tea drinking in Nigeria is that you now have different options to pick from. When we were growing up I mean 25, 30 years ago the only thing we had on our breakfast table was tea, and tea being coffee or chocolate beverages. Today lots of kids will like to take caprisone or flavoured milk for breakfast. We didn’t have flavoured milk when we were growing up but today there are 30 or 40 flavoured milk options available. Even with the tea, there are lots of hot beverages. So what has impacted the tea market is that one, there are now lots of options that accompany breakfast. Secondly, the industry has not been dynamic, before Top Tea came to this country what we had was one tea brand that existed and that was in the same format for 50, 60 years. Every other place in the world there has been change in packaging, in format and in the quality of diffusion, in flavors there has been massive change that has had to keep up with the evolution in consumer choice all over the world. But in Nigeria it has not been the same, so you move from where you were dominant in terms of backwards behavior some people had. Some people had complex of options and you have done nothing else to show consumers that look we understand your needs and am providing solutions that meet your needs and that is why the tea segment has not been growing as fast as it ought to. Top Tea has come to change that in terms of the product they deliver to consumers, in terms of the options available for consumers and what is important to the Nigerian consumer is that we provide solution to meet their needs. In recent times what you see people do is that they take lemon grass blend it and add to their tea. People wanted tea that had lemon and that didn’t exist in Nigeria and the MD of Promasidor said look what the consumers want and what is important to them and in understanding what is important to them we have gone ahead to say that we will constantly review products that in every consumer need, we have it met. One of the things that consumer wants is taste and flavor, and we will give them taste and flavor and even multiple flavours, if that is what they want. We will give them a brand that they can take not only at breakfast time. If you look at our communication now we are saying that there is something new with Top Tea. We also want to change the habits that tea should not only be drank in the morning because possibly the healthiest drink you can have in life depends on the options you have in tea and it is because that’s where the Chinese are always looking healthy because they can drink ten or more cups of that tea in a day because tea is good for your health. Some say, it is good to help manage heart attack because if you drink warm tea regularly it will reduce the ability of cholesterols from clotting and all that. There are lots of benefits in drinking tea and remember tea is from leaves. So it makes it clear that we should always drink a lot more of tea. But you know Nigerians we only drink tea in the mornings. What we want to change is that we should actually drink tea at every point in the day whether in the morning or afternoon or in the night whenever we have a break, we should drink tea. Because it is important, we need to inculcate the habit, we need something healthy as a people and as a nation. What is the market share of Top Tea? We are the number two brand in the market and in the next two or three years or so we will grow faster than the number one brand. So our vision is to be the number one tea brand in the market in the not so distant future. But today, from the reports, we are two brands in the market. Knowing that one, we are a young brand and we were launched 1998 and we have spent only 14 years in the market and we are competing against a brand that has been in the market for 50 or 60 years. Apart from keeping the equity of Cowbell as a brand, what are your plans to bring other brands of the company to the same level in the face of consumers? Cowbell is just one brand in our stables and we are have over seven brands, our job is to make sure that every brands is as big or even bigger than Cowbell, we started the journey with Loya and we have seen transformation on the brand, that was why the brand won the most transformed brand in 2011 as voted by ADVAN. We are transforming that brand and we are looking at what we are going to do with our Top tea brand in this 2012.we are started the journey with Cowbell and now it’s the turn of Top tea and the rest of them will follow.