A heart-felt obituary to Parle’s Cafe Cuba

Sometime it does feel like life isn’t fair. And we would be right to think that. One more thing that confirms it, is the failure and subsequent stop of the awesome Parle Cafe Cuba soft drink in India.

On the topic of it’s death, I was still wondering whether I should call it. I am not sure if Parle has pulled the plug on it. But looking at the fact that it is not available anywhere I guess it is time to call it. As one of the rare fans of the drink, it was disappointing to see it go off shelves.

Parle did a lot of things right with respect to the campaign. They gave vague Ads, positioned the drink as as ‘offbeat’ experience(I am going to ignore the ‘Revolution’ claims) and put together a fresh product that was new to a population addicted to Caffeine. They produced an actual quality product that tasted great. It all seemed nice… until it wasn’t.

1. The Ads were too vague, nobody understood that they were selling a drink. In India you need to sell drinks like drugs or condoms — glamour, ecstasy, hot ladies, fake stories about getting laid — the whole nine yards. Subtle, abstract Ads usually don’t work. The Ads also featured foreigners for some reason.
2. The taste was good for a cola drink. But the problem was the content. Most people who are used to drinking milk or black coffee didn’t like it. Their idea of coffee was massively different from what Cafe Cuba offered. I felt this was the single largest reason for the failure.
3. People never really did understand how I was drinking something that was not made by either Pepsi or Coke. The brands are too large for Parle to side-step. Like, you are going to drink a cold,carbonated drink — Why settle for something new? Coke/Pepsi in the hand or on the desk looks way cooler than ‘Cafe Cuba’.
4. Sweet Coffee flavour can work wonders with milk, but not so much on it’s own. When people buy milkshakes or canned drinks, they expect it to be sweet. But only if it is with milk or juice. If coffee was offered mixed with milk, maybe it would have worked. But it was offered akin to Black coffee, which is no sugar and no milk. So now you have lost your regular Milk shake buyers as well as Black coffee drinkers. The market was not ready for Cafe Cuba and it could reach only so much.
5. Excessively strong flavour meant that even fans like me couldn’t go the end of the can without taking frequent breaks. People don’t usually consume 200ml of sweet coffee. The flavour, which was supposed to be the selling point worked against it.

It is sad, but true. I liked it and it liked me. Only we were never meant to be together.