Media

 
The over 80-year-old brand, which has an extremely loyal customer base, is back on shop shelves, albeit in a youthful avatar
Change is never easy. So, when a company decides to take a brand through a major relaunch, it can’t be done half way. It requires all the passion the company can bring to the job—and the best communication skills. Cholayil’s marketing subsidiary, Dorcas Market Makers, is putting all of that into the relaunch of Cuticura, which once upon a time was synonymous with talcum powder in India. “We want to become a multi-brand, multi-product company,” says MC Anand Kumar, senior vice-president (sales & marketing) at Cholayil.

Chennai-based Cholayil (better known for its Ayurvedic brand Medimix) soft launched Cuticura, which it acquired from Muller & Phipps in 2002, in parts of eastern and western India (besides parts of Delhi) in April this year, not as a talc—although that continues to do well in the south—but as a range of deodorants in youthful, florescent packaging. Dubbed DeO2 (O2 standing for Oxygen), the re-packaging and new graphics is a big risk, but Cholayil has decided it is a risk worth taking if it wants to bring the magic back into a brand that had a strong national presence in the seventies and eighties. Cuticura De02 is available in three different fragrances—Original, Lavender and Pink Passion, and is priced at Rs 65 for 75 ml and Rs100 for 150 ml.

Meanwhile, the company is also experimenting with youth fragrances for Cuticura talc, and is exploring product variants in the form of roll-ons and sprays to make the Cuticura brand more relevant to the emerging consumer. (When Cholayil took over the beleaguered Cuticura in 2002, the talc was available only in its original form.) Now, Cuticura talc comes in two variants—Cuticura Original is available in pack sizes of 20 gm (for Rs 5), 50 gm (for Rs 16), 100 gm (for Rs 29) and 400 gm (for Rs 72) and Lavender Mist for 20 gm (Rs 5), 50 gm (Rs 17), 100 gm (Rs 30), 400 gm (Rs 76).
Some of these moves appear to have paid off. Post-acquisition, Cuticura has grown to become a Rs 10-crore brand with a marketshare of over 14% in Kerala, its largest market, contributing more than 50% to total sales. Cholayil expects it to grow into a Rs 75-crore-plus brand by 2010, which may not be easy, given that the market is crowded with a handful of well-entrenched players.
Indeed, talcum powder is the most popular cosmetic product in India. Estimated at Rs 725 crore, the market is growing at 10-12% annually. Category awareness is high at 80%, with a penetration of 45% in urban areas and 25% in rural areas, according to market estimates. Hindustan Lever’s Pond’s dominates the category with a 70% share, followed by Johnson & Johnson with a 15% share, with Spinz (CavinCare) and Cinthol (Godrej Consumer Products) being the other two well-respected national brands.

Cholayil’s strategy is to contemporise Cuticura by infusing an element of youthfulness into it. So, gone are the orange and white cans, substituted by hot pinks and fluorescent blues. “It’s akin to Bajaj’s movement from the scooter to the mobike category,” explains Josy Paul, country head and national creative director, David, the agency that executed Cuticura’s re-entry into the skin-care segment.

Since the challenge is both to retain Cuticura’s current consumers as well as cut ice with a younger generation, the company has re-packaged the product in a rather guarded fashion—first, by going easy on the graphics and, second, by soft launching the new range in just a few select outlets in some metropolitan cities. Even the TV campaign for DeO2 went on air in a phased manner, stretched over a period of four months. “We will step up gradually into the next summer season with television commercials, print ads, below-the-line activities and shop collateral,” says Anand Kumar.

For Cuticura, the choice of deos over talc for the north India market appears to be strategic. In the south, ‘make-up’ essentially means dabbing a lot of talc on the face (a factor that earlier spurred HLL to launch a Fair & Lovely talc). So while talc is a big category there, Cholayil had to woo the new consumer base in the north with deos.

In any case, the talc category is not exactly the easiest to crack. Though HLL’s Ponds Dreamflower talc continues to be the lead brand in the category, the company had to withdraw Vaseline talcum powder and shelve plans for the extension of Fair & Lovely into the talc category. It was test launched in Andhra Pradesh in 2002 and then jettisoned.

But Kumar points out, “talcs do go beyond face applications… So, even though powder as a category may not be as big in the northern states as in the south, it has its own share of consumer franchise and applications in other parts of the country.” That’s something the company would like to tap through suitable product offerings.

Interestingly, Cuticura is distributed globally by UK-based Keyline Brands, which was acquired by Godrej Consumer Products in October 2005. Vintage brands that come loaded with heritage make attractive targets for acquisition (Godrej Consumer Products has reportedly evinced interest in acquiring the brand). But Cholayil’s Anand Kumar insists the company has no immediate plans of selling off its prized possession. But that’s certainly not deterring him from giving it a much-needed makover.