Rainco mosquito-proof nets endeavour to protect every household

 Rainco Thegi Dela Season 1 reward ceremony addressed by COO Ahamed Aroos

After recently concluding an extremely successful novel consumer promotion titled ‘Rainco Thegi Dela’ for its mosquito nets, Rainco Ltd. Chief Operating Officer Ahmed Aroos shared his views on the company and its ethos. Following are excerpts:

Q: Briefly describe the Rainco brand.

A: Rainco has been in business for almost 40 years, and Rainco as a brand is quite young, only about 19 years old. Rainco initially began with the umbrella in mind, but used the brand across our product portfolio including rainwear and mosquito nets. Rainco is a product brand as well as a corporate brand name. We are both an employer and corporate brand using its product brand in umbrellas, mosquito nets and for rainwear. 

Apart from that we are into three other difference categories; family care, shoe and foot care. We have acting distributors, marketers for our own brand as well as some exclusive imported brands with agencies for Sri Lanka.

We are a fully integrated organisation with a back-end supply integration starting from China and India and production factories. We also have fully-fledged sales and marketing, distribution and logistics units.

Today we have a brand equity of about 95% in Sri Lanka, while our market share is currently about 70% plus and this is in the domestic market. We also export to over 12 countries and now focusing on taking the successful Rainco brand global.

Q: How has Rainco achieved such immense success in the mosquito net category?

A: The mosquito net category has been with the company for the last eight years. However, as a brand we started driving it only about three years ago.

From our understanding, in the first five years, the mosquito net was similar to a commodity operating in a very generic space in the market. We soon realised we have an extremely valuable value proposition to offer the consumer. Living in a country such as Sri Lanka, a tropical climate, mosquitos are a menace. As mosquito borne disease were spreading we wanted to take our message to consumers, helping them to become more conducive to use the product because we understood there was a lot of barriers as to why they were not using the product.

To understand the consumer, we commissioned a comprehensive research in 2016 seeking their pain points and now many people were actually using the nets, how many people were not and if so the reasons behind it because we saw a clear benefit of using mosquito-proof nets. We firmly believe it is a more natural form of staying away from mosquitoes. Our research showed that many Sri Lankans are deprived of sleep – apart from health hazards, mosquitoes disturbed sleep.

With this understanding we completely revamped the product and transformed the branding perspective across the entire product range when compared to the commodity we were selling before. We upgraded the product, introduced unique innovations, changed the packaging, the communication on the packaging and created a massive marketing campaign taking the brand to the consumer. 

We witnessed a huge opportunity and experience impressive growth in terms of the category. We were able to reach 40% more consumers post the re-launch. As a result of this journey, Rainco was selected as the ‘Most Innovative Brand of the Year in 2017 at the SLIM Brand Excellence Awards.

Q: Have Rainco mosquito-proof nets also achieved the prestigious ISO certifications?

A: We have received ISO 9001:2015 and two other accredited international certifications that define our manufacturing facilities. All our products are manufactured in these factories and go through the process of these certifications. Thereby the stringent quality applied of our products are certified.

Q: What was the objective of your recent ‘Rainco Thegi Dela’ promotion?

A: Despite achieving success through the brand we realised that the mosquito net is still perceived as a rural product. Not many modern households have the product. Thus we developed the aesthetics, design to fit into the modern household.

Along with these new features we wanted to incentivise the consumer to purchase the product. 

We wanted to take this proposition and share our success with more consumers in the country. Though the re-launched reached 40% more consumers, from the households in Sri Lanka that is only about 1.2 million. This includes the entire category.

We realised we needed to take this product to all the households islandwide as the most natural form of mosquito protection. This is also similar to our vision to ensure that every household has a Rainco umbrella. Now our vision is to take the Rainco mosquito net to take to every household nationwide.

 We also needed to ensure that by encouraging more people to buy the products they would not get caught buying cheaper non-branded products.  Many households only buy one mosquito net and all attempt to fit into that. By holding the competition we have motivated them to get a new mosquito net, maybe for an additional room or upgrade their old one. Thus our competition has ensured consumers of direct and indirect benefits.

Q: Briefly explain the novel competition

A: The competition was very unique. We gave the consumer more reasons to consider when buying a mosquito net; not just taking care of the mosquito menace and a good night’s sleep but also offering other benefits. The execution was very different. We took a mobile-led digital route. We were able to bring in all the digital concepts and directly get in touch with the consumer, engaging them throughout. They had the opportunity to immediately respond by giving a missed call being directly involved in the campaign.

Our three-month campaign was quite successful and we received a very high response rate, close to 65,000 entries. We were able to offer gifts and awards every week with handsome prizes. The first five lucky winners received bedroom sets worth Rs. 200,000 each, eight second place winners received Singapore tours with two tickets per person, 60 third place winners received a cash bonanza of Rs. 10,000 each. Every single customer who registered received instant reloads ranging from Rs. 50-100 ensuring all Rainco Mosquito Net consumers became winners.