A bevy of deodorants is challenging Axe’s dominance in the market. Will it stand out in the clutter?
Hindustan Unilever created the deodorant market in India from scratch in 1999 when it launched Axe. At a time when conservatives still ruled the roost, Axe was positioned as an instant babe magnet. The brand proposition was cheeky: Dude, wear Axe and women will begin to fall over you. It clicked. The deodorant market in 2009 touched Rs 500 crore, according to Nielsen. Skincare companies say sales are growing in excess of 40 per cent per annum. In a couple of years, deodorant sales should overtake talcum powder which is a Rs 900-crore category growing in single digits.
With the Indian male more conscious of his looks (body odour included) than ever before, this is a market which will only grow in the days to come; the upside is huge. The penetration in the deodorant market is just 2 to 3 per cent. This has attracted over a dozen brands. While Hindustan Unilever leads the pack with Axe (25 per cent market share), other large players in the market place are Henkel (Fa, 8.5 per cent) and CavinKare (Spinz and Hi5, 7.4 per cent). Then there is the long tail: Paras Pharmaceutical’s Set Wet Zatak, Mankind Pharma’s Addiction, TTK Healthcare’s Eva, Godrej’s Cinthol, Reebok, Adidas, Nivea and a host of others. You could call them the armpit warriors.
Where does this leave Axe? Rivals say they have chipped away its dominance in the last few years. Many have positioned their brand along similar lines — the babe magnet. To add to the confusion, all deodorants are priced between Rs 100 and Rs 150. In the last two years, another flank has opened up for Axe: Antiperspirants. Discerning buyers will, sooner or later, move towards antiperspirants. Hindustan Unilever has launched Sure to take on Nivea Silver Protect and Garnier Mineral. This is bound to eat into deodorant sales. Elsewhere in the world, deodorants are efficacy-led; in India, the market is driven by fragrances. And this is a never-ending challenge — one has to come out with fragrances regularly to stay a stride ahead of rivals.
Hindustan Unilever Category Head (deodorants & oral care) Srinandan Sundaram is not too perturbed with the bevy of deodorants in the market. Axe’s market share may have fallen, but the market too has grown. He believes that there is enough scope in the area of attraction, and hence the company will not reposition or redefine what Axe represents. Axe will continue to position itself as the ‘cool iconic youth brand’, and the young male (18-25 year olds) will remain the target for Axe. “If consumers are not talking about us in the same space as the young and trendy Fastrack, or a Coke or Pepsi, for example, we have a problem,” reiterates Sundaram.
There could be important spinoffs from the youth focus. “While youth is our advertising target audience, we are not saying that the older generation will not use a deodorant. Compare Axe to a pair of Levis jeans — we have grown up wearing it and even when we are 30 or 40 years old, we continue to use it,” says Sundaram. He also believes that in the Indian family structure targeting the youth makes sense. Youth today form a source of knowledge in large families, and the use of novel products might trickle down to other age groups. In addition, “several families often share products; so even though a young guy might buy a deodorant, the product is often used by other members in the family,” says he.
Rivals claim that 30 per cent of Axe users are women. Does the focus on the dude not alienate this strong base of consumers? “While there is no data to verify this, it is good for us. Since Axe set the tone for the category, many women liked the fragrance and started using it,” says he. But will this convince Axe to launch a product for women? “There is nothing in the pipeline,” he says. “Our brand proposition was focused on young males and we believe this market is large enough for us to grow in,” says Sundaram. Masculine fragrances, after all, account for 70 per cent of total deodorant sales in the country.
Sharpening its edge
But how will it differentiate itself in the crowd? Not so long ago, Axe could have become a generic brand; today, it is one in the crowd, though still the market leader. Anand Halve of chlorophyll believes that there is much work to be done for deodorants to reach their full potential. “This will only happen with the shift in the perception of deodorants — from a product seen as a special occasion product to one that is fast becoming a part of the daily grooming regimen.” So does Axe need to rethink its communication?
“A young teenager is always looking to attract girls every day, the more the merrier; hence the proposition lends itself to him using the product every day,” says Sundaram. “Daily application is an opportunity the brand is working towards. We believe there will always be a teenager for whom it is important to attract the opposite sex and will therefore look for only fragrance.” According to him, in the metros at least, deodorants are no longer a special-occasion product. “There are people are who very comfortable getting up in the morning, spraying it and going to school, college and office, which is reflected in the category growth.” A category which was earlier dominated by impulse purchases is gradually moving towards habit. Will it get there in the next two years? Sundaram doesn’t think so, but the shift is there for all to see.
The mainstay of Axe’s communication strategy has been its advertisements. It has something to do with the nature of the retail trade in the country. Deodorants, like other skincare products, are still bought by and large in grocery stores. Such stores do not stock testers. So all that a consumer can do is use the imagery that the various brands have created in his mind. The Axe ads are imported from abroad and tweaked for India. Lowe Lintas is the agency for Axe. Lowe does not talk about this account, because it isn’t authorised by Hindustan Unilever to do so. But the ads have done well. The Axe ads have 60,000 to 500,000 views on YouTube, which is way above Set Wet Zatak (15,000 views) and Garnier Men (2,000 views).
Increased competition has forced Hindustan Unilever to increase its advertising budget. However, Axe will not experiment with altering its brand’s perception, but will look for ways to enforce its products’ original appeal. “We have done this through our Musicstar campaign where we combined music and humour to appeal to the youth. The advertising is about attraction but there is an element of humour when the car breaks down. It is exaggerated humour but consumers find it very appealing,” says Sundaram.
Sundaram believes there is the need to educate the consumer to accelerate penetration. Axe is therefore trying to educate its consumers to differentiate and recognize fragrances in its recent advertisements. “For example, if you ask consumers to describe a fragrance, they have a problem. In the latest television commercial for Musicstar, we are beginning to dimensionalise a fragrance by using a simple word as a descriptor for a particular fragrance,” says he. “For each of the variants, the company is working on descriptors which consumers can clearly understand, such as for Axe Dark Temptation we describe it as irresistible as chocolate. The moment consumers hear the word chocolate, they are able to tangibilise it. Similarly, if you use wild fragrance, you associate it with a bold flavour. We believe that if we get this journey right, consumers will be able to distinguish between good and bad fragrance, and this will be our point of differentiation from competitors.”
Clutter-breaking
Sundaram says unique activations are helping Axe differentiate itself from competitors. An example is the Axe “Call me” campaign which showed beautiful women giving out their mobile numbers to men who wore Axe. The campaign resulted in 3.5 million calls on the Axe number. This campaign was finalised after a study of 750 girls across six cities in India about phone conversations. The study showed that getting a girl’s phone number is the first step in the mating game and the girl would be willing to give her phone number to the guy she liked. “We had 35 per cent repeat callers, which shows the stickiness of the concept,” claims Sundaram. The “Call me” campaign was extended to a free wake-up service where users could request to be woken up by an Axe angel. It was a 360-degree campaign and saw an extension into print and outdoor. To reach out to the target audience, the company also placed Axe chits in Levis jeans. There was a phone number on the chit where consumers could call and connect with an Axe angel. “We have kept fragrance cards in outlets like Cafe Coffee Day and even bars and clubs, where our target audience learns about our fragrances,” says Sundaram.
Besides television, the company is also experimenting with the digital medium — the hangout zone of the present-day youth. “We need to move where our consumers are and we need to understand young men’s media consumption habits,” says Sundaram. “Our target audience is someone who is constantly on the move, and with the use of mobile phones and the Internet we hope to get much better consumer engagement.”
The company has thus launched an online game: Axe Instinct. “The game was played by over 3 million people, of whom 55 per cent were repeat players,” claims Sundaram. “The success of this game allowed us to build a new game for Axe Musicstar. The game was played by 4 million consumers which is a huge amount of population.” Besides gaming, Axe also created the Axe Angels fan page on Facebook. This builds on the argument that the youth these days often base their choices on peer recommendation. “In a period of six months since its launch in May 2010, the page has 700,000 friends and we are very happy with the quality of engagement,” says Sundaram. Other brands like CavinKare’s Hi5 have also taken the digital media route, but its Facebook account currently has only 4500 friends.
Are these digital activities translating into sales? “While there is no way you can directly measure this, these activities certainly build a certain measure in the mind of the consumer. The Axe brand aims to be perceived in a certain way and these activities are definitely helping the brand achieve this,” says Sundaram.
Meanwhile, a handful of rivals have moved away from the ‘sex positioning’ to look at newer ways to differentiate themselves. Godrej Consumer Products, for instance, has got Hrithik Roshan to endorse its Cinthol deodorants. “He will portray the user as an active and outgoing guy. The brand will not look at age segmentation, but will focus on psychographic segmentation,” says Godrej Consumer Products Category Head (personal wash) Anindo Samajpati. L’Oreal, on its part, with Garnier Mineral is focused on men who lead an active lifestyle. “We will not play on insecurities and instead focus on the science and rational benefits of the product. Our deodorant is enriched with perlite and absorbs five times more sweat than a talcum powder,” says L’Oreal India Director (consumer products) Vismay Sharma. Similarly, CavinKare’s Hi5 range of men’s deodorants is focused on ‘sporting’. And Nivea has in its crosshairs not teenagers but office goers in their 20s. “Many people use deodorant like a fragrance and spray it on their clothes. Hence our packaging provides specific instructions to spray the deodorant on the body,” says Nivea Marketing Director Soma Ghosh.
Will Axe’s faith on the babe magnet still work?
