More Lovely than Fair? "Ek Fair & Lovely dena!"

1975-2000: For the first 25 years, if a consumer asked for Fair & Lovely, a shopkeeper would reach into a shelf and unhesitatingly pull out a small pack or a sachet.

2004: Today, a retailer may have to pause and think. Fair & Lovely fairness cream?

Or F&L under eye cream? Or F&L face wash? Or fairness soap? Or ayurveda cream? Or anti-marks cream? Or deep skin cream? Or oil control gel? Oh, none of these? Anything from the newly launched 12-product range of Perfect Radiance from Fair & Lovely perhaps?

Over the past five years, one of Hindustan Lever Ltd’s (HLL) most powerful and dominating brands, Fair & Lovely, has been undergoing a quiet and careful transformation. And in a period when the media can’t seem to write enough of how HLL is having a problem moving its topline up, F&L can’t seem to stop growing. Brand sales have roughly doubled to Rs 500 crore in just three years, says the company. Today, F&L is among HLL’s six largest selling brands: among them are two detergent brands (Rin and Wheel), two bathing soaps (Lifebuoy and Lux) and one tea brand (Brooke Bond Red Label).

Note that all the other five HLL brands are from product categories that are far vaster than skincare, where F&L resides. The detergent market was worth Rs 5,300 crore in 2003, bathing soaps Rs 4,200 crore and branded tea Rs 3,100 crore. In comparison, the skincare market is valued at only Rs 1,200 crore annually. If F&L nevertheless manages to compare with brands from other significantly larger categories it’s because it has a stranglehold on the fairness cream segment where its share is upwards of 75 per cent. And even in the larger pool of skincare products which F&L sees as its broader arena, it has a 40 per cent share. Though HLL won’t share precise figures, it is almost certain that its market share domination makes it one of the company’s most profitable brands.

The brand has also been moving quickly to occupy a wider skincare territory. Over the past four years, Fair & Lovely has grown its beauty portfolio to include a number of products. The most recent, launched last month, is also the most intriguing. This is the specialist, premium skincare sub-brand - Perfect Radiance - under the Fair & Lovely umbrella. The Perfect Radiance range comprises 12 skincare solutions, including a face wash, a face mask, wipe pads, a sun defence moisturiser and crème, a night nourish, and pedicure and body lotions.

While the new variants have helped growth, agrees Vivek Rampal, vice-president - skincare HLL, he points out that the company "simultaneously upped media spends and invested heavily on advertising, which saw a change in the nature of Fair & Lovely communication". In 2003, industry sources say that the ad spend on the entire F&L range put together was in the region of Rs 70 crore (the ayurveda as well as anti-marks creams got the maximum support). The basic fairness cream continues to be the main driver, as it pushes its way into small-town and rural India. Rampal adds that there was also "a positive rub-off from the investments we have made on the Fair & Lovely Foundation, which helps the brand link with the progressive economic empowerment of women."

As interesting as the figures is the manner in which the Fair & Lovely brand has been transforming itself to keep pace with the changing aspirations of its target audience. The fact that this operation has been delicately performed does not make it any less dramatic. Unnoticed by most, the brand has been slowly moving from ‘gorapan’ (fairness) to ‘nikhaar’ (radiance) to widen its ambit. Would Lovely & Fair be a more appropriate name now?Marketing 1

Back in the seventies and early eighties, much before PowerPoint templates and ‘vox pops’ became a rage, matrimonial columns culled from national and regional newspapers constituted an important component in internal company presentations on Fair & Lovely. The word ‘fair’ was highlighted to reinforce that the market for fairness creams was potentially huge and untapped. The slant in matrimonial columns may have changed only marginally but the thinking on Fair & Lovely - largely mirrored by its advertising - has ceased taking all its cues from Sunday matrimonials. Today, F&L’s is ‘the promise of empowerment’.

The early F&L advertising made no bones about the benefit it was selling consumers (of course, it helped that those were less politically correct times). The shift from ‘gorapan’ to ‘nikhaar’ (which actually dates back to the end-eighties) is only one manifestation of F&L’s efforts at recasting itself through its communication. While much of F&L’s early advertising focused on establishing the brand as an easy, harmless and natural way to fairness (the initial fight was largely against Afghan snows, homemade skin treatments and problem-solution products such as cold creams and petroleum jelly), ‘romance’ blossomed as an advertising peg within a few years of the brand’s launch.

"At that time, fairness was central to the need of a woman at the time of her wedding. The idea was not to be demure about it, but say it like it is," says Pranesh Misra, president & COO, Lowe, the agency on the F&L account. While romance and marriage occupied centerstage through much of the eighties and early nineties, the brand brought the trademark ‘scientific demo’ into its advertising in the early nineties. The idea was to provide skeptical consumers a strong reason-to-believe.

The first major conceptual shift happened with the ‘Husbands hote hi aise hain’ film in the mid-nineties. Although it too operated in the romance zone, the story was post and not pre-marital. "The ‘husband’ film not only enabled a different cut on romance, it also served to demonstrate what Fair & Lovely could do to younger, unmarried women by talking about rekindling the romance in marriage," says R Balakrishnan, executive creative director, Lowe.

That change in communication has been accelerated since 2001 which saw the ‘singer’ commercial. The film - which was about a young music teacher who attracts the attention of her eligible neighbour - moved in the direction of depicting the Fair & Lovely girl as someone who has more than one dimension, and more importantly, someone who has a life outside and beyond a 30-second commercial.

If the ‘singer’ commercial brought viewers in touch with an unexplored side of the Fair & Lovely girl, the ‘airhostess’ and ‘cricket commentator’ ads established her credentials as someone with aspirations over and above finding herself a soul mate. Far from being the romantically inclined pretty young thing of the eighties and nineties, the Fair & Lovely girl was portrayed in these ads as a talented individual who nurtures dreams of achieving professional success. And in some ways, the image of the romantic Fair & Lovely girl doing everything to impress her guy was turned on its head with the ‘matching-matching’ ad for the brand’s under eye cream (the confident Fair & Lovely girl doesn’t think the guy is quite up to the mark).

"The brand has always mirrored the mindset and aspirations of Indian women," explains Misra. "If in the seventies and eighties marriage and romance was the high point in her life, in today’s changed environment, the focus is on professional aspiration and fulfillment. The brand stands for empowerment of women by enabling them to achieve their goals."

Through all this, some of Fair & Lovely’s advertising has continued addressing fairness-related concerns with marriage in mind. The ‘kundali’ film for the brand’s ayurveda-based variant, and the ‘lucky girl’ film Marketing 2

for its deep skin cream have both treaded that familiar route in the recent past. Balakrishnan, however, sees these films as extensions of the brand’s ‘empowerment’ idea.

"The idea in the ‘kundali’ film was to establish the Ayurveda advantage in an old-world setting, but at the same time demonstrate that you don’t have to surrender to the old-world notion of accepting your destiny," Balakrishnan says. "Fair & Lovely empowers you to change your destiny. And the ‘lucky girl’ film is also about the girl demanding to be treated equally. The point is, if she can be called a ‘lucky girl’, why can’t the guy be called ‘lucky boy’? The films use the romance-marriage peg to say how the woman has a definite space under the sun." The shift in Fair & Lovely communication, Balakrishnan believes, is one of a confident woman taking control of her life instead of being a passive acceptor of things.

The recent changes that have been brought about at the product and communication levels raise a valid point. Is Fair & Lovely, as a brand and as a brand promise, increasingly moving from ‘fair’ to ‘lovely’? Is the brand, the way it is today, less about fair complexion than it was a decade ago?

Rampal’s response, "The beauty element stays at the heart of Fair & Lovely. The brand does not go away from the functional benefit even as it builds an emotional connect with consumers."

One thing is for certain. The brand is no longer focusing purely on the middle-class mass-market consumer. It is trying to get consumers from different SECs to buy into the brand, and the Perfect Radiance range is a clear case of imbuing F&L with a premium sheen. "Fair & Lovely is not so much about fairness as it is about skincare," agrees Misra. "And one of the properties of this is skin lightening. In that sense, Fair & Lovely is moving away from fairness - without really moving away from fairness." Misra however, insists that in essence, the brand "will never vacate" the property of fairness.

While HLL’s Rampal also agrees that "the pond is bigger than it was earlier", he has a different take on the direction in which Fair & Lovely is headed. "In India, you cannot separate fairness from beauty, and to the consumer’s mind, fairness, beauty, younger skin, clear skin and radiance are interchangeable." In his opinion, the skincare category in India is about a bundle of consumer benefits that go under one name, and here, as in the rest of Asia, the category is led by skin lightening. "Yes, Fair & Lovely’s focus today is no longer single-minded on fairness, but on devising products that work on both skin lightening and meeting specific skincare requirements. Fair & Lovely currently has different products for different consumers. The focus is on skin, and the brand is today about a bundle of advantages that the con-sumer would look for when seeking skincare solution."

"But, for all this," he adds with a pause, "I’d rather use a word that is easily understood by consumers - fairness."

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