The good ol' Rusk - piping hot from Britannia's oven!

Britannia Biscuits is now foraying deeper in the bakery foods category with their recent launch of Britannia Rusk. The campaign is based on a ‘wacky’ idea based on a spatial family during tea time. The commercial enthuses interest in the viewer and subtly brings out the under-lying ‘family-time’ that comes along during evening tea. The brand has already extended to the healthy-foods and dairy-foods category. While the two seem more distant from their primary offering – biscuits, rusk is a relatively closer cousin. With the organised bakery industry taking baby foot-steps, the bulk of the market is still un-organised. While biscuits are now largely controlled by big brands such as Britannia and Parle, products such as rusks, puffs and filled-buns are still in the local bakery offing.

With a relatively lower entry-barrier to launch the product, Britannia has done right by extending the brand to the new product. The brand would be well-advised if it markets the product under a sub-brand similar to its other sub-brands such as Bourbon, Tiger and Good Day.

The product should also be offered with more flavour variants and can do well in reaching a larger consumer number. With biscuits already being positioned as a tea & coffee snack, rusk has the potential to be that welcome change. Hitting the retail stores with distinct product dispensers, sampling promos and an attractive price-point will help garner consumer attention. Biscuit manufacturers are increasingly trying to serve more customer segments by introducing speciality products (like McVitie’s introduced Digestives) which were not present in the organised biscuit market – hinting a trend of biscuit manufacturers diversifying their offering.