Indian corporates wake up to women
power By Siddharth
Srivastava
NEW DELHI - Top Indian
male actor Shahrukh Khan is now featured in an
advertisement for bath soap that has been promoted
for the past 75 years by local beauty queens.
Generations of Indians have grown up
watching top Bollywood actresses promote beauty
soap - nearly 50 have had their faces splashed on
Lux soap wrappers and billboards. But now Lux,
which is produced by Hindustan Lever (the Indian
arm of multinational Unilever), is experiencing
dwindling sales and increasingly stiff
competition. As a result the soapmaker is
undertaking a "brand revamp".
Bring on
Bollywood's Shahrukh - heartthrob to millions, mostly
women who love to see him
naked surrounded by floating rose petals in a
bathtub. Using a movie idol to sell products to
women is a reflection of the growing money power
and independence of the product's female target
audience.
He is the only Indian man to
endorse the product but not the only male to
appear in a Lux campaign. Hollywood actor Paul
Newman was once the face of a Lux campaign in the
West, but the ads did not appear in India.
While promoters are keen on the
advertising campaign, market analysts are not sure
how much Shahrukh in a tub is going to translate
into sales. Women consumers can be difficult to
judge. Internationally, there have been instances
in which such brand revamps have resulted in sales
dipping further.
Motorcycle giant Harley
Davidson tried it in the early the 1980s when
faced with tumbling market share due to the
arrival of new Japanese bikes in the US. Harley
focused on women bikers, but the advertising did
not help.
The final success or failure of
the Lux campaign will only become clear in time.
However, ad filmmaker Prahlad Kakkar thinks the ad
will sell: "I think it's a great strategy, as most
of the time these guys make females doll up in
bathtubs, and who are the people who see those ads
more? The men - who don't use the soap. At least
with Shahrukh, who is popular with his sensitive,
emotional appeal across women of all age groups,
they have ensured that the buyer will also see the
bare-chested man in the bathtub."
The
Shahrukh ad has brought focus on the importance of
women as niche spenders. In a free market, the
consumer is king - with men replacing beauty
queens if the need so arises and the competition
so deems.
The past few years have seen a
tremendous resurgence of female workers in India,
courtesy of the growth of a service sector that
contributes to more than 50 % of India's GDP. This
sector is considered friendly to women employees.
Working women, whether single or married, are
earning more and spending more, which is why
corporate and marketing strategies are being
fashioned to target women.
Women are also
filling positions in hospitality, tourism, health,
market research and education. They are estimated
to account for 20-25% of white-collar workers in
software, information technology-enabled services
such as call centers, pharmaceuticals,
biotechnology, market research, financial services
and advertising-marketing-media. That is up from
10% in the 1980s. According to predictions of IT
industry body NASSCOM (National Association of
Software and Service Companies), 65% of IT jobs
will be held by women by the end of this year.
Specifically, women already comprise the majority
of employees in the IT-enabled service sector. In
several India's cities, single women make up the
second-largest group of homebuyers.
It is
estimated that there are more than 100 million
working women in India though 90 % are still in
the unorganized sector, but their say in making
economic decisions is growing. According to a
survey by Business Today, ACNielsen and ORG-Marg,
working women are slowly becoming a lucrative
target group for a large number of products and
services, including apparel, grooming services,
financial products, consumer goods and even
leisure and entertainment.
The overall
picture also indicates that more and more women
will seek to enter the workforce. Female literacy
levels have risen to 54% as per the 2001 census,
compared with 40% in 1991. Management institutes
are reporting a larger proportion of female
students. The enrollment of women in higher
education increased to 40% in 2001 from 33% in
1991.
Recent decisions by the Indian
courts have removed some of the biases against
women in relation to property inheritance. Women's
voices have become more prominant in local
politics while the Indian parliament has been
discussing a reservation bill allowing more seats
for women. India's corporate world is also
getting the first taste of "girl power", which has
made worldwide celebrities and top endorsers of
tennis players such as Anna Kournikova and Maria
Sharapova as well as pop singers Britney Spears
and Christina Aguilera. Indian tennis player Sania
Mirza is just 18 years old, yet she is set to
overtake the top celebrity brand endorsers in the
country. She has become an icon for young girls, a
prime example of a women making a mark. She should
spawn many more wannabes.
She caught the
eye of world audiences and sponsors at the recent
US Open tennis tournament. After her US Open
sojourn she was pegged as the joint second-highest
grosser in endorsement deals amongst sports stars
in India. She is in the same bracket as Rahul
Dravid (a cricketing hero) - second only to Sachin
Tendulkar, the cricket God of India and the
country's only million-dollar sports star. Sania
Mirza, in November, was valued at under US$15,000
per deal while her current rate has reportedly
climbed to more than $400,000.
Indeed,
consequent to India embarking on the path of
economic reforms, there have been several
indicators that executives with the top Indian and
international brands have been going out of their
way to please the local consumer, whether men or
women. There has been a fall in overall prices,
which translates into more innovative marketing
strategies to kick up sales volumes - the kind we
see involving Shahrukh.
Ad spending across
the Asia-Pacific region has been on the rise, and
India wants to be no exception. By and large,
developing countries spend anywhere between 4-5 %
of GDP on advertising, whereas India has hovered
below 3 %. Observers say that a country such as
India needs advertising to create demand and
change attitudes, given the strong negative
sentiments against consumerism.
Shahrukh
must have been paid a huge amount to sign the Lux
deal. The idea is to court the consumer, in this
case the women, who should have no complaints.
Siddharth Srivastava is a New
Delhi-based journalist.
(Copyright
2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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