Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) major Hindustan Unilever, which has been passing through rough weather since the beginning of 2009 finally manages to arrest the slides. Aggressive advertising campaigns and brand re-launches activated earlier this year helped in this.

Rs 8000 crore soap market...

The estimated Rs 8000-crore Indian soap market took an interesting turn this- year, withseveralhome-grownFMCGcompanies like Godrej, Wipro and ITC eating up the pie of the multinational maker of the popular soap brands like Lifebuoy, Liril. Hamam, Breeze and Lux, which had been ruling households for years.

This forced the company to embark on a major brand re-launch exercise, under which its entire soaps portfolio was given new packaging and fragrance, besides decreasing the prices and grammage of some of them.

"After a long period, HUL has revamped its entire portfolio,” an HUL official had told PTI Economic Service saying that the strategy has helped arrest its declining market share.

Last year HUL had been enjoying over 50 per cent share of the soap market. But rival brands like Godrej No.l from the Godrej Group, Wipro's Santoor and ITC's Vivel have eaten into its pie this year.

As per A C Nielsen's August report, Godrej No. 1, with an annual sales of Rs 500 crore, has overtaken HUL's Lifebuoy and Lux in the North Indian market in terms of both value and volume share.

Convenient price points of Rs 5 and Rs 10...

"Our price points of Rs 5 and Rs 10 have helped us in achieving the sales, "Godrej Consumer Products Managing Director Dalip Sehgal.

Godrej No 1's share currently stands at 10.9 per cent while Santoor and Vivel hold 8 per cent and 1.5 per cent, respectively.
However, HUL left no stone unturned to regain its market position adopting a slew measures, including re-launching the entire soaps portfolio, introducing pro-ducts in lower price points besides going for aggressive advertisement campaigns addressing emerging cons-umer preferences.

The company re-launched Lifebuoy with an ‘improved formulation’ while Lux was introduced with new ingredients and underwent new packaging, besides bringing out in Rs 10 pack. Besides, Liril, which has been targeting the youth segment, de-glamed to a family soap, doing away with its over decade-old pattern of featuring a new face in its ad campaigns.

Besides, the company has gone aggressive in its brand visibility initiatives, adopting measures like ad-blocks, where it had blocked other advertisers and aired only its commercial for an entire day on all the Star TV channels and Zee TV.

All the nine channels of the Zee Network aired only brands from HUL's portfolio of personal and skin-care categories like Lifebuoy, Dove, Ponds and Fair & Lovely. This was later followed by Zee where all the 25 channels from the network played only ads of the company for a whole day.

While market analysts are still sceptical about these initiatives, others say that the efforts have started paying results .

"They (HUL's brands) were definitely market leaders. But years back there were no Godrej no.l, Santoor and the likes," an analyst said.