Davit Vadakaria, IBSU, Marketing Program – Branding Laboratory

Prologue

Georgian Ice Cream industry has been a very competitive market to enter and sustain yourself, not a lot of brands make it through. One of the prominent examples of famous Georgian ice cream is Gurjaani ice cream. Based in Kakheti’s city Gurjaani, this brand was many children’s favorite growing up and creates a very nostalgic feeling when you are eating it. To better understand the importance of Gurjaani ice cream and how did it become such a staple in our childhood memories, let’s analyze it with five levels of product.

Research & Analysis of 5 levels of Product

If we think about the core benefit of ice cream, it’s as simple as fulfilling the need for hunger and cooling on a summer day. If we go deeper, the generic product should have only one vanilla flavor, wafer cone, packaged in some sort of paper. Talk about the most generic ice cream that already exists on the market, it would be Senaki’s ice cream, plain and simple nothing more nothing less. After the second level begins, the differentiation and competition start to be more prominent. The third level is the expected product, all the Gurjaani ice cream consumers expect the ice cream to be produced in Gurjaani with the same technology and the same flavor in the same packaging for the same price.  The next level is augmented Product, where we see the range of ice cream types the Gurjaani offers, cone ice cream, ice cream on a stick, brick style covered in chocolate, sandwich-style ice cream. All these variations on top of multiple types of flavors create a wide range of options that consumers can choose from. Even though the Gurjaani offers a lot of options, its competitors are also trying to stay relevant and creative to one-up other successors. Barambo ice cream is one of the dominant brands of ice cream in Georgia, they were the ones behind iconic jeans “eskimo” ice cream which became one of the most popular ice creams when it hit the market. That is also the reason why Gurjaani underwent a rebranding and introduced a more cohesive and elevated brand that could compete with other ice cream giants. This idea of revolutionizing the brand is also tied with the last part of the product levels, the fifth level, the Potential product. At this level, we talk about how the company listens to feedback and generates ideas to potentially improve a product. Somewhere around 2017, Gurjaani sales were not promising and all of its faults was its old-style packaging. The primary market of kids who were purchasing this product has already grown up, and the kids in 2017 did not understand the packaging because they don’t have a nostalgic connection with it and as for people who grew up with Gurjaani ice cream, they preferred more sophisticated types of ice cream such as Magnum because they still associated Gurjaani ice cream with their childhood. So to fix this issue, Gurjaani updated their packaging that appealed to the young kids of nowadays. Also added a new line called “Tavaduri” that offers more rich and intense flavors for older people who might enjoy the less sweet, sugary, and childish feeling.

Findings and recommendations

After the analysis, we get to see the path of improvement for the Gurjaani ice cream as a brand and as a singular product. The main problem being the old-style ways of representing the product was later on fixed by the process of rebranding, but this is not where all the problems end. Gurjaani needs to understand that, especially nowadays when trends just come and go, it also applies to ice creams too. Which flavors are more popular now, maybe people are more interested in new more unusual flavors like Barambo offers with their mixture of Banana and Strawberry, or Raspberry Panacotta. The brand has to offer more than just regular ice cream that everyone thinks is okay, it has to be exciting, interesting and the best one you can get.