From ExtraJoss to Entrasol, the companies behind these products, Kalbe Consumer Health and Kalbe Nutritionals, have embarked on a series of transformations to generate new growth.
ExtraJoss, with the launch of a new RTD version, ExtraJoss Ultimate Can, and the introduction of a campaign that aims to attract young, aspirational consumers, has grown by 25%.
“The brands that win in ASEAN preventive health and nutritionals win on emotional and social meaning, not product specifications,” said Dr. Rudolf, director-in-charge and president commissioner at Kalbe Nutritionals and Kalbe Consumer Health.
Both Kalbe Nutritionals and Kalbe Consumer Health are part of PT Kalbe Farma Tbk., one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in Southeast Asia.
Dr. Rudolf first joined Kalbe Consumer Health about two years ago as CEO and president director.
During his stint as CEO and president director, he was tasked with driving product revamp projects to drive growth as the parent company transforms itself into a wellness company, beyond being an OTC company.
Extrajoss...not just an energy drink
One such project was to turn around the performance of the energy drink brand Extrajoss through premiumization and also crafting a brand image that resonates with consumers.
“One of my key strategies was to premiumize. While a product does not have to be expensive, it needs to have an image that is premium...” said Dr. Rudolf. “The second point is to be relevant to consumers. Every product has the job of reflecting the consumer using it. When consumers purchase a product, it is not just about getting a functional benefit. Brands would have to consider the social and emotional value that they deliver too.”
Based on this philosophy, the company has crafted a narrative targeted at young Indonesians pursuing their career aspirations in megacities like Jakarta.
It has also added new products such as the RTD Extrajoss Ultimate Can, on top of its previous powder sachet format, and has since generated 25% growth.
Dr. Rudolf, who was subsequently tasked with leading product transformation at Kalbe Nutritionals as well, emphasized that brands have to understand what exactly consumers are seeking in a product, beyond the health benefits that it delivers, when wooing ASEAN consumers.
Last year, he also recorded his experience and views on ASEAN’s consumer market in his book “Navigating ASEAN Proven Strategies for Consumer Goods from Scholar-Practitioners” co-written with Dr. Amalia E. Maulana, professor in marketing at West Jakarta-based BINUS University.
Two years ago, both Kalbe Consumer Health and Kalbe Nutritionals were under-performing relative to the assets they had. Today, they are profitable, faster growing businesses with clear positioning in the proactive wellness space and portfolios that are meaningfully premiumized.
That did not happen by improving products at the margin. It happened because we asked a different question: not ‘how do we sell more?’ but ‘whose journey are we on, and what does progress look like to them?’ When you answer that honestly — when you genuinely walk alongside the urban, aspirational ASEAN consumer as they build the life they have been working toward — the brand strategy, the product architecture, the pricing, and the communication all follow with unusual clarity.
Dr. Rudolf Tjandra, director-in-charge and president commissioner at Kalbe Nutritionals and Kalbe Consumer Health
The premise
The above philosophy is guided by the belief that the consumer health and nutrition category operates in a space different from the pharmaceutical and curative medicine sector.
In the consumer health and nutrition space, functional differences between competing SKUs could be minimal and formulations comparable.
“If you look honestly at most products in this space across ASEAN, you will find that the functional differences between competing SKUs are minimal. The active ingredients are largely the same. The formulations are comparable. The claims, within any given regulatory environment, tend to converge,” he said. “Everyone is essentially offering a minimum viable product with no definingly significant functional advantage.”
In this context, he believes supplement brands competing based on their product specifications are fighting “the wrong battle.”
The real competition, he believes, is for the meaning that a brand or product conveys.
“The real competition is for meaning — for whose brand becomes the one that a consumer chooses to be seen with, to give as a gift, to put on the living room shelf where guests will notice it,” he said.
ASEAN’s hot markets
Dr. Rudolf believes that Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines are the top three ASEAN markets for consumer health growth.
Indonesia, by virtue of its market size, is one with immense growth opportunity.
“Two hundred and eighty million people, a rapidly expanding urban middle class, and consumer health penetration that remains materially below what the country’s economic trajectory should support. The opportunity is immense.”
While the country, consisting of 17,508 islands, is highly complex when it comes to distribution, regulations and cultural diversity across islands, he said that brands willing to do the hard work could stand to win.
“That complexity is the moat. Brands willing to do the hard work of building genuine presence in the last mile will find a competitively protected opportunity at scale,” he said.
Vietnam, on the other hand, is where brands could find the aspirant consumers, especially in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi.
These urban consumers are sophisticated, status-conscious, and increasingly investing in wellness, beyond traditional remedies.
“Vietnamese consumers are buying into a vision of themselves as modern, educated, health-aware. Premium positioning works, provided the brand can credibly occupy that imagery,” he said.
The Philippines, he said, was an “underrated” market, although it could be considered a highly brand-literate market in Southeast Asia with its common use of the English language, a strong OTC pharmacy culture and a diaspora-connected consumer base that already knows international brands.
“The Philippines is underrated, and I think deliberately so by brands that have not committed to understanding it properly...” he said. “The challenge is infrastructure outside Metro Manila. The opportunity is a large, aspirational population with real purchasing intent and limited access to genuinely premium options.”
Across all three countries, he added that the urban middle-class consumers are not primarily thinking about health, but more about how purchasing certain products portray the lifestyle that they aspire to.
“These consumers are thinking about building a life that looks and feels different from their parents’ life. Health and wellness products are part of that vocabulary. But they enter the consumer’s life as markers of progress, not as medicines,” he said.
This, he said, was a point that most imported brands have missed.
“Most imported brands are not built for this — they arrive with a product story, a clinical story, a category education story. They have not asked the more fundamental question: what does this purchase mean in this consumer’s life, and in the life they are trying to build?”
What more can brands do?
Elaborating on his first point of fulfilling consumers’ social and identity needs, he said that brands that understood this would adopt marketing fundamentally different from Western health marketing.
“The newly urban, newly middle-class consumer across ASEAN is on a journey that has no real Western equivalent in pace or intensity. They are the first generation in their family to have discretionary income. They are buying their way into a different life — not just in material terms, but in identity terms...” Dr. Rudolf said. “Consumers buy the premium supplement not just because they believe in it, but because being seen to choose it says something about where they are in life.”
Building on this, brands should therefore not only think about how they can innovate the product formulation, but also consider how they could help consumers make better progress.
“Status, family obligation, community belonging — these are not soft considerations that sit alongside the functional job. For a large and growing segment of ASEAN consumers, they are the job,” he said. “The vitamin or the protein supplement or the functional food is the vehicle. The destination is being recognized as someone who is moving forward, living well, and setting a standard for those around them.”
Brands that failed to understand this might over-invest in product features which consumers already take as table stakes and under-invest in the codes, imagery, and stories that actually move people.
The winning consumer health brands of the next decade in ASEAN will not be the ones with the best formulations. They will be the ones that became part of how a generation of newly urban, newly middle-class consumers expressed their arrival — and their ambition. That is the brief we have been answering at Kalbe. And we are only at the beginning of what that can build.
Dr. Rudolf Tjandra, director-in-charge and president commissioner at Kalbe Nutritionals and Kalbe Consumer Health
