Our Work

Avin, an IT company and subsidiary of Mellat Bank Group, planned to enter the Iranian app based ride hailing market. With an established market leader, in the form of Snapp, as well as competition from other businesses fighting for a share of the market, convincing passengers to switch from their existing service providers proved a key challenge

For over 40 years, Fouman Chimie Behdasht have been developing their range of consumer products, manufacturing these to exacting standards, in their own state-of-the-art facilities. They have established a presence in several categories across the personal care market, with their Caspian brand being the clear market leader in the Iranian hair spray category. In order to drive cross-category growth for the Caspian personal care business, FCB needed to re-define its optimum brand positioning for the Iranian market. To deliver this, FCB decided to work with the brandgym, a London-based brand agency, and Coley Portel Bell, a global design agency. The project required close cooperation and coordination between the brandgym, Coley Porter Bell, and Fouman Chimie Behdasht’s Iranian management and marketing teams. The challenge was to localise the brandgym’s and Coley Porter Bell’s work to ensure that it resonated with Iranian consumers and meets the needs of the local market.

Rahmani Group’s well-known brand ‘Mani’, represents the majority of the packaged nuts and dried fruits business within the group’s food division. They had developed an aggressive growth strategy with the launch of serval new brands of various food and beverage categories. To help facilitate the new strategy, the business had recently hired a series of young, ambitious marketers who, despite their passion and a few years marketing experience, lacked a strong skills foundation.

The majority of businesses operating in the Iranian dairy market pursue a similar strategy when it comes to brand positioning. Little variation when it came to brand image, and a general lack of differentiation, lead to heavy price competition, and ultimately resulted in low profitability. Ramak, a leading Shiraz based dairy company in the south of Iran, was no exception. Their brand lacked distinct features in the minds’ of potential customers and consumers, meaning it was unable to become the preferred brand of consumers. Ramak’s challenge was to find the optimal brand positioning that would ensure the brand was able to contribute to driving sales and allow the company to achieve a price premium.

Ramak, a Shiraz based dairy company, had identified the breakfast cheese market as being highly profitable in relation to other diary segments. As such, it was looking to expand its business in this category. Ramak’s objective was to establish themselves as a key market player by carving out a strong and viable position in the market; servicing yet unmet consumer needs; and creating new market segments.

For all businesses, market research and intelligence are consistently required to make informed strategic decisions, identify and mitigate risk, and determine new and emerging business opportunities. Unfortunately, it is often the case that data in the Iranian market has limited availability and can often be imprecise. This means that producing useful business insights can often require a specific approach to marketing intelligence.

Ramak, a Shiraz based leading dairy company in the South of Iran, did most of its market research internally, but were unable to produce many of the insights they needed. The challenge for Ramak was how to procure sufficient and reliable external data.

Ramak, a leading Shiraz based dairy company, was not satisfied with the poor return on investment of its marketing spend. The business was uncertain as to whether the cause of this was a lack of skills within the marketing team, or other factors, such as marketing processes or the availability of tools and resources. Therefore, Ramak wished to improve their marketing capabilities to achieve above industry average quality and return on investment, in a location where marketing talent is difficult to hire.

Ramak, a leading dairy company based in Shiraz, identified that it was not winning in store and with customers. Through consultation with Certius, Ramak realised that they needed to significantly improve their capabilities in shopper, channel and customer marketing. The company therefore decided to establish a specialised trade marketing department which would take ownership of these tasks.

Sepahan Battery is the Iranian market leader in high-quality car batteries. Its business strategy is aimed at strong volume growth, price premium, and market leadership. Previously, the company did not have any dedicated trade marketing capabilities, and so was lacking a key element needed for sustained business success. With a track record of helping businesses build trade marketing teams, Sepahan turned to Certius for help.

Sepahan Battery is the Iranian market leader in high-quality car batteries. Their strategy aims at pursuing strong volume growth, premium pricing, and market leadership. The company realised that in order to build further on their competitive advantage, they needed to strengthen their ability to win over not only car dealers, but also the end-user. For Sepaphan, driving business through end-user marketing was a new area of strategic value creation but had been accepted as the right strategic move for the company. To ensure success, Sepahan Battery wished to dramatically increase the capabilities of its end-user marketing team.

Under the well-known Mani brand, Rahmani Group’s food division is the market leader in packaged nuts and dried fruit. The company did not yet have a dedicated trade marketing function, with these responsibilities failing to the marketing team to deliver. With Iran’s rapidly changing retail trade dynamics and competitive situation, manufacturers are becoming increasingly required to differentiate their plans by trade channel and in some cases by customer. To succeed, Rahmani Group realised that building a first-class trade marketing capability would be critical.

A European multinational, whose distributor provided it with a market presence in Iran, wanted to take a fresh look at the market opportunity and find new ways to grow their business.

A multinational beverage company was considering entering the Iranian market. As a first step they wanted to gain a strong foundational knowledge of the business environment and common practices in Iran, as well potential market entry strategies, and as the beverage market specifically.

P&G believes in consumer centric communication in order to build strong brands locally. However, because consumers are not the same across the world, P&G wanted to understand how to craft communication that is locally relevant to Iranian consumers. Hence the overall question was “What are the keys to great Iranian advertising?”

• Which insights connect with the consumer?
• Which ways the brand benefit is best shown?
• Which creative tools and executional elements resonate with consumers?

This required thorough understanding of the local consumer and the landscape of advertising in Iran.