As sales for the Clearly Canadian Beverage Corporation’s Orbitz brand continue to sink like an anchor, it seems that all is not lost for the Vancouver-based company.
In fact, despite feeble sales of the company’s award-winning beverage with the suspended flavor gels, Clearly Canadian is reporting an overall improvement in net profitability. The company has even announced plans to launch two new products into select test markets in the u.s. before the end of the year.
According to Jonathan Cronin, Clearly Canadian’s vice-president of marketing, the company is right on track with its growth plans, despite the quickly waning popularity of Orbitz. ‘Our expected life-cycle of the product is coming true,’ he says. ‘It was a high-impact, interesting brand that caught people’s attention.’
Launched in 1996, Orbitz is a non-carbonated beverage with natural fruit flavours and colorful floating gel spheres. According to Cronin, the brand was created to appeal to a younger demographic, primarily teens looking for a change of pace, who like weird and eccentric things.
‘Orbitz is still weird. It’s just not new in 1998,’ he says. ‘We weren’t expecting Orbitz to sell in 1998 what it sold in 1997.’
And, clearly, it didn’t. Sales for Orbitz in the first half of 1998 are off almost 85% over the corresponding prior year results. As of June 30, sales totalled $1.46 million, compared to same-period sales in 1997 of $9.4 million.
‘The Orbitz model was one we liked because it was high-impact and generated a lot of sales very quickly for us,’ says Cronin. ‘But we weren’t banking the company’s success on Orbitz. We were expecting some short term returns and success and that’s in fact what’s happened.’
And now that the novelty of the Orbitz brand has fizzled, Clearly Canadian has its sights set elsewhere, although it has no immediate plans to discontinue the brand. Before the year is over, however, Clearly Canadian will be launching two new products into select test markets in the u.s.
Battery, currently a leading energy drink in Finland, is a caffeine-powered beverage that will hit a Seattle test market in September. The other is a super-oxygenated drink that will fall under the Clearly Canadian brand name. Both are scheduled to hit the Canadian market in January.
According to Cronin, the new products allow Clearly Canadian to extend itself into new territory while still not venturing too far from familiar ground. ‘We don’t market in mainstream segments because there’s not enough market for us or our distributors,’ he says. ‘The mainstream soft drink and bottled water companies take care of that.’
Similar to its approach with Orbitz, Clearly Canadian does not plan to advertise its newest brands but will try to gain publicity through product placement, sampling and event marketing – avenues Cronin says have proven successful in the past.
‘Our products are niche products, each with a particular consumer in mind,’ he says. ‘Advertising tends to be too mass for our products and, quite frankly, not affordable. So we have to get attention in other ways.’
