Household hygiene products giant, PZCussons has launched a category extension of its well known laundry soap brand, Canoe.The company has introduced a new Canoe detergent product. The new Canoe detergent brand which began arriving shop shelves few weeks ago, is described as a” premium quality product” on the product packaging by parent, PZCussons Plc. Why is the company undertaking ‘category hopping’ for the Canoe brand at a time when the market for soaps and detergent appear saturated? Many analysts believe the answer lies in competition and rivalry among leading soap and detergent makers ,especially between the big two—Unilever Nigeria and PZCussons Nigeria.
Two years ago, rival Unilever extended its Sunlight soap brand product to detergent. A move which PZCussons may not have countered at the time by doing a similar extension of one of its several laundry soap brand products. But since then, PZCussons has gradually grown the Canoe brand by several re-formulations to deepen its appeal to consumers , which set the stage for the recent extension to detergent. In June,2010,it introduced the new Canoe wrapped laundry soap range which comes in three variants – Canoe Extra Care, Canoe Active Fresh and Canoe Ankara.
The new Canoe detergent is priced at comparable levels with longstanding detergent brands both from PZCussons and leading rivals– Elephant(PZ),Omo, Sunlight (Unilever) Ariel and Bonux(P&G).Leveraging on Canoe also helps PZCussons put a second brand product in the detergent market as archrival–Unilever and P&G.
