BIZ-INNOVATION!

HUL:A CLEAR SOLUTION

Hindustan Unilever's Pureit water filters are touching millions of lives worldwide.

Annisa, a 35-year-old home-maker, lives in the suburbs of Jakarta, Indonesia's capital. She usually starts her day by hauling a 20-litre container to a nearby water kiosk where waits in line
for a couple of hours to fill water for her family to drink and for household chores. Twenty litres last just two days, but millions of Indonesians would rather haul water home like this than drink tap water, which is often
polluted and tastes salty.
On the other side of the world,30-year-old home-maker Marisol,
who lives in a small Mexican town, has a similar problem. A
cholera outbreak in the 1990s,caused by poor quality municipal water supply, destroyed her trust of tap water. Marisol buys 20-litre
containers of water at her local super market every two days.
Consumers like Annisa and Marisol mean business for Pureit,
a water purifier developed for
the Indian market by the world's largest consumer goods
company, Unilever, at its Bangalore research centre. The filter was test-marketed in
Chennai in 2004, and gradually sold across India over the next
four years. Today, it also sells in Bangladesh, Brazil, Indonesia,Mexico, Nigeria and Sri Lanka.

When Pureit was launched,water purifiers such as Eureka Forbes's Aquaguard had been on the Indian market for over a decade. To be successful, Pureit
had to be different. One major difference was price: Unilever
priced the entry-level product,Pureit Classic, at Rs 2,350 - less
than half the entry level prices of other purifiers. The second
important difference was that,unlike other products, Pureit did
not need electricity. "Unilever decided that water would be one
of the key drivers for the future,way back in 2000," says Anupam
Bokey, General Manager (Brand Development) for Pureit.
"Providing safe drinking water was not only looked at as an area which would rake in revenues,
but it also became part of the company's vision to give back to
society."
Unilever's promise that Pureit could make even filthy water fit to drink seems to have been
more than advertising hoopla.One of Pureit's earliest advertising campaigns featured a
man collecting water from a dirty overhead tank and a pond, and
rainwater in a bottle, and challenging a Pureit salesperson
to purify it. The commercial showed the salesman putting the sceptic's doubts to rest by purifying the dirty water right
before his eyes. "We have offered Rs 1 crore in prize money to anyone who can prove that some
other water purifier brand can purify water better than Pureit,and there are still no takers for
that money," says Bokey proudly.
The biggest challenge when Pureit was launched was to win
over consumers. "Though there were many water purifier brands in the market, penetration was low due to steep pricing," says Bokey. "Moreover, water safety was not at the top of people's minds. People preferred to boil water, and would do so only when their kids fell sick."
Another challenge was that while the lack of safe drinking water was a common problem in several countries, each country had its own peculiarities. For
instance, Bokey says, unlike Indians, Indonesians did not boil tap water. However, he adds,
they are more aware of the importance of clean drinking
water. And Mexicans, he notes,have a deep mistrust of tap
water. Consumers in many countries were uncomfortable
with the idea of drinking purified
tap water.
Unilever had to find a way to offer the best technology at a
low price, says Bokey. Most water purifiers used reverse osmosis
technology, which requires electricity. Pureit puts water
through four stage of filtration,in which sediments, dirt,
parasites and residues are removed. The process requires
no electricity, which poor people either lack or find expensive.
"Pureit ensures that you get the level of safe drinking water that meets US Environmental Protection Agency norms from the first litre to the last," says
Bokey. He adds that the product warns the consumer when the
filter parts are due for
replacement, and shuts off when
it can no longer dispense clean water. Thus it ensures that
consumers never drink unsafe water.
Pureit's affordability helped overcome consumer resistance.
"In Indonesia, we told
consumers that the cost of Pureit was 16 times less than a 20-litre container of water," says Bokey.
"Similarly, in Mexico, the cost of a litre of packaged water is 60
times more than that of a litre purified by Pureit."