An ageless proposition
| The basic concept employed by Wipro to sell Santoor soap has not changed in over two decades.. |
Anil Chugh, Senior Vice-President, Wipro Consumer Care and Lighting
Anjali Prayag
For over 20 years now, the Santoor woman has continued to baffle people with her ‘ageless skin.’ Is this an adman’s bold bet on selling a concept or is it just a creative expression that has worked well for a traditional sandal p lus turmeric soap for over two decades?
Today, as the No. 1 soap brand in South India and No. 3 in the country, Santoor’s context of ‘mistaken age’ has not lost its sheen, insists Anil Chugh, Senior Vice-President, Wipro Consumer Care and Lighting. The need for maintaining a youthful skin is universal and cuts across cultures. “Women like their skin to lie about their age and in the last 20 years, we have made the context of ‘mistaken age’ contemporary and so it has not lost sheen,” argues Chugh in favour of the campaign retaining the same proposition for long.
Santoor, launched in 1984, was an atypical soap for the period, positioned in the ‘natural ingredients’ segment when the market was crowded with 100 brands from 20 companies with health, beauty and skincare and freshness as their selling points. The dominant brands then were Lifebuoy, Liril, Lux, Rexona, Hamam and Cinthol. An extensive market research threw up the answer for Wipro Consumer Care, a soap that would offer consumers the benefit of ‘younger looking skin’ with ‘natural ingredients’, and thus the beginning of a creative expression that has remained consistent through two decades.
Although the company has retained the concept in essence, it has allowed the protagonist to evolve from a traditional ‘mother’ to an achiever willing to step outside her home. The year 2003-04 was a landmark year for the company when the brand was re-launched with glamour and achievement both woven into the product. The white variant was launched in 2006 and the company brought in Bollywood actors Saif Ali Khan and Madhavan to add glamour and male admiration to the mix.
And so the mother-daughter characterisation continues. Chugh is confident that if the company continues to keep it current and relevant it will not lose its sheen even in the future. More importantly, it’s working well and there’s no compelling reason to change it, he believes.
When Wipro’s consumer care division test marketed Santoor in the country in 1984, it was found that the then four lakh-tonne soap market, growing at five per cent per annum, needed a soap that created a unique brand and what was desirable was ‘looking young.’ Three re-launches later and at a market size of 5.57 lakh tonnes and value exceeding Rs 7,606 crore, the original sandal plus turmeric (Orange) offering has two new variants (Santoor White and Glycerine). Why did the company take so long to experiment with the brand? Chugh says that any new variant should expand the market, adding new customers to the brand and enhance its equity, and all this without cannibalising the current customer base. Therefore, the company waited for its core offering to achieve critical mass before addressing new segments through variants. Santoor is now a Rs 600-crore brand with its three variants.
With a value share of 15.1 per cent in the South Indian market and 7.5 per cent all-India, it is now among the top three brands in the country, and grew at 18 per cent last year. But Chugh is all poised to replicate the soap’s success in the South in other upcountry markets. In Maharashtra, for instance, Santoor is a close No. 2 with 22.7 per cent market share in June 2009, just behind Lifebuoy which is at 22.9 per cent.
Santoor has now occupied two price positions in the soap market: Santoor Soap priced at Rs 18 for 100 gm in the popular price segment and Santoor Glycerine priced at Rs 20 for 75 gm in the premium price band. In 2008, the premium soap market was estimated at Rs 1,750 crore and the popular segment at Rs 4,184 crore. The sub-popular range accounted for about Rs 1,674 crore.
Apart from the soap variants, Santoor has extended the brand to new but related products: cream, face wash and talc. Though Chugh refuses to divulge individual sales details, the talc is doing well with a market share of around seven per cent in some of the core Santoor markets, he says. The company has effectively used the modern retail format for these products. Enchanteur and Romano, brands from Unza, its overseas acquisition, were launched to address the needs of the customers walking into these stores. Enchanteur is a fragrance-led brand in personal care for women with products in the deodorant, perfumes, talc, hand and body lotion and handwash categories. Romano is a male grooming brand with hair gel, shaving foam, shampoo, talc, shower foam and deodorant.
In fact, the brand’s regular categories have a respectable presence in these stores and its market shares are relatively higher here than traditional trade market shares. These stores give the company the opportunity to interact with customers more closely, he says.
With Santoor wooing the 30-something Indian woman, isn’t it an oversight to leave out the majority of the potential user segment? Isn’t the brand alienating the man of the family, who’s left to admire the ‘woman with young-looking skin?’ Chugh explains that the brand’s positioning of ‘secret of younger looking skin,’ is universal and cuts across all age groups. The mother-daughter combination connotes that it is a soap for the family. We are not alienating the ‘man’ in the family, insists Chugh, explaining that in India, sharing a soap among family members is quite common. Moreover, soaps targeted at men or the ‘masculine soaps’ segment is very small in India.
The company is also betting on another variant with natural ingredients that would address customers in the urban and Tier I cities seeking premium and luxury offerings. Chugh says the ‘modern’ variant would be launched during the coming season and would be priced at Rs 18 per 100 gm pack. The Santoor woman has thus evolved with the soap while the soap has evolved with her.
