BackMale grooming emerges as fast growing segment
The last one year has seen a slew of product launches as men quickly adapt to skin care products more broadly
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Mumbai: On a recent weekend trip with a group of friends, Ayesha Ghandy, 29, noticed that the men in the group carried more personal grooming products such as shampoos, hair gels, body wash and deodorants than the women who were borrowing these products from their male friends.
Ghandy herself used her friend Gaurav Verma’s Garnier Men anti-sweat deodorant on the trip.
In the last one year, there has been a slew of men’s product launches led by Emami Ltd, which extended its Fair & Handsome skin cream to face wash. Dabur India Ltd has also been launching men’s products under Oxy Life, and earlier this month Procter and Gamble India Ltd introduced Head & Shoulders Men with the tagline “Men are Back!". The product urges the male consumer to “Stop using your wife’s shampoo and switch to Head & Shoulders Men". Earlier in September, Raymond Apparel Ltd’s extended its Park Avenue brand into the shampoo category by targeting the evolving man with a beer shampoo.
“Male grooming is one of the fastest growing segments," said Abneesh Roy, associate director, institutional equities and research, Edelweiss Securities Ltd. Consumer goods companies have started to focus on new categories, after facing the brunt of the slowdown in the past one year, according to Roy.
“The Indian personal care market has historically been driven by family brands and now you are starting to see some brands become specialist female or male brands. Individualism is still not that big, as men are indifferent to the brands they use," said Sameer Satpathy, executive vice-president and business head, Marico Ltd, the maker of Parachute hair oil and skin creams.
At Marico, the revenue split for its personal grooming categories from men and women is in line with the population census, but tilting a little bit in favour of women for categories such as hair care as women have longer hair.
The nascent men’s personal care and grooming market is just 8% of the overall $10 billion ( ₹ 61,000 crore) personal care market in India, according to Neelesh Hundekari, a partner at AT Kearney India, a consulting firm. The personal care market includes soaps, shampoos and oral care.
There are exceptions, most notably in categories such as fragrances, which includes deodorants and perfumes. Men constitute nearly 60% of the overall sales of the fragrance category in India. This is the inverse of the global average where men constitute just one-third of the overall sales of fragrances, and women account for the majority at two-thirds of the total market, said Marco Riggio, director, L’Oreal India.
For instance, Indian men account for a larger part of the perfumes category than their counterparts in the US, where the bifurcation of the fragrance market is 68% women and 32% men. Even in Asia, women account for 83% of the overall fragrance market and men account for just 17%, according to a 2012 study by L’Oreal.
To be sure, the Indian fragrance market is small at $250 million, according to Hundekari. The global fragrance market is $30 billion, according to a Mintel report, Fragrances 2013 and the Future.
Culturally, fragrances have not been a part of Indian dressing-up, according to Santosh Desai, chief executive officer, Future Brands Ltd. The men’s fragrance category has also been marketed as a functional category to overcome odour due to the harsh climate in India or to attract women, Desai said.
The fragrances category has traditionally evolved as a male category in India, with some of the older deodorant brands such as Axe and Zatak catering only to the male consumer. In the past, erstwhile Paras Pharmaceuticals Ltd had launched a female deodorant brand Eclipse that didn’t really work and it is only in the last one year that marketers are once again looking at going after the female consumer in the fragrance market. Last year in May, ITC Ltd launched Engage deodorants for men and women, and more recently, Vini Cosmetics Pvt. Ltd, founded by Darshan Patel who earlier ran Paras Pharma, has once again launched Fogg deodorants for women. Even in perfumes, Titan Co. Ltd has launched a men’s and women’s range. “Hyper competition is leading to the creation of new categories and leading to the expansion of the overall market," says Roy of Edelweiss.
However, men are quickly adapting to skin care products more broadly. For instance, for Kiehl’s, which is owned by the L’Oreal Group, men account for 20% of overall sales in India, which is higher than the global average of 15% of overall global sales coming from men for the brand, said Riggio, who finds that the Indian urban male is aware of the brand and ready to adapt to skin care regimes.
“The Indian male consumer is looks conscious," said Govind Shrikhande, managing director, Shoppers Stop Ltd, India’s oldest retail department chain. For Shoppers Stop, 50% of the overall department store revenue comes from males, and in categories such as perfumes this is higher at over 60% coming from male perfumes.
“Men in India really spend time and money for grooming. They are also brand conscious and spend money on the latest launches as they well versed with the trends due to the Internet and their travel overseas," according to Varsha Dalal, executive director, Baccarose Perfumes and Beauty Products Pvt. Ltd, one of the largest distributors of luxury beauty products and perfumes in India. Baccarose also has a retail presence through speciality chain Parcos, which sells deodorants and perfumes in 50 stores across six cities.
Women, on the other hand, are more worried about reactions from cosmetics, make-up and fragrances, according to Shrikhande. However, this is slowly changing. “The growing urbanization and becoming a part of the workforce is driving them to adapt to the category," he said.
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