Elephant Tea: Challenges In The New Era

Nowadays, digitalization is the tendency in the whole world especially after the pandemic. Every company, no matter big or small, new or old, they are all trying to shift their tradition strategies to the digitalization.

As a national brand, every French knows elephant tea. But when I do the offline interview, some young people told me that they didn't even know if the brand still existed. When I googled Elephant Tea, I couldn't find the brand's official website either. There is only one website called “Ma Vie En Couleur”, an online platform that represents a collective of brands. And this platform takes on the function of the official website of Elephant Tea. Only on this website can you find more comprehensive information about Elephant Tea, such as the vision, values of the company and all product information. After researching, I found out that “Ma vie en couleur” is a program that was created at the initiative of manufacturers, Mondelez, Unilever and the agency Publicis Chemistry in 2011. Since then, many manufacturers have trusted it and joined it in order to offer their customers more and more information advantages and news about the life of their favorite brands. People can find many good deals and especially discount coupons to save money during their food shopping. At the same time, the site also offers a free quarterly magazine with many coupons, some healthy life styles and recipes. We can see that housewives are the main target of this website

After checking their social networks, it became clear that they were not operating in this area at all either. The official account was found on YouTube, but there were only a few videos with few plays and comments closed.

I also tried typing the keywords "French tea brands" in English and French in the search bar, and there was no Elephant Tea on the first few pages. Even when I searched for Elephant Tea, many unrelated articles would appear. It seems that this brand does not have a strong voice on the Internet, and it seems to have disappeared among young people.

According to the information collected, there are two main sales channels for Elephant Tea today. One is the traditional offline supermarket and retail channel, basically all French supermarkets carry this brand of tea; the other is the online retail platforms.

Judging from company’s behavior and performance, they seem to have given up on running the online business by themselves and instead outsourced to other platforms. But even with outsourcing, it hasn't worked out very well as we can see they didn’t do a good job at search engine optimization.

However when I checked out their ad, I found a very interesting fact. It was that there was a website address at the bottom of the ad video. The web is called mangerbouger.com which is a forum to give informations about health life and food recipes. It is evident that Elephant Tea is really concerned about green and organic food, and has always wanted to associate the product with a healthy lifestyle.

Despite being acquired by Unilever, it did not help Elephant Tea to successfully transform itself in the digital age. Because of the lack of information, I cannot conclude whether the brand itself did not want to adopt this strategy or there were other factors that did not support the strategic transformation of the company.

LAN Yilan

https://www.mavieencouleurs.fr/marques/elephant