Skin Deep…?
Dr Ranjan Das
Almeida Professor of Strategic & International Management, IIM Calcutta Consulting Editor Strategic Marketing

“Nothing makes a woman more beautiful than the belief she is beautiful,” said Sophia Loren.
Vineeta, a thirty year educated career woman, was nervous. She was stranded on a busy street, with her scooter refusing to start. A few minutes ago, the damned machine stalled. Those few minutes were like eternity for Vineeta. Usually confident and composed, Vineeta felt helpless. First she struggled with the electric start button, it didn’t work. She couldn’t reach the starter kick pedal from her sitting position. She got off and tried to kick the machine to start. By this time her nice green salwar had got stained. She then struggled to bring the machine on its center stand, which required all her might and almost got her toes crushed. Vineeta then got help but not without feeling miserable in full public view.
Her experience reveals many things about women. In absence of alternatives women have to use products that are not designed for them. Women crave to look good. They wish to be independent and mobile. They wish they could do without help from men. They wish to be themselves. Few manufacturers care.
A certain Kinetic Honda came around with electric start and gearless driving. It looked feminine. Kinetic Honda was a huge success. An Activa rode in with nicer looks, good power, better brakes, and decent fuel efficiency. Activa became a runaway success without so much of bragging and boasting by Honda. These were mere happy coincidences on a long road littered with products born to insensitive design and brought to customers by arrogant marketing.
There are many more examples - a ketchup bottle with a crown cap which needs a man to open, a tin with tough metal seal that requires a hacksaw for cutting, a sachet of shampoo that requires a pair of scissors, a coconut oil bottle that drips with oil despite all the fancy packaging, a cell phone requiring complex menu navigating abilities and that comes with complicated telephone bills, cars with awfully low roofs requiring crawling to get inside, and movie theaters where women can not walk between two rows without feeling embarrassed.
Women no doubt can manage all the above creations by men and they do it with minimum fuss. But you would earn their gratitude and loyalty if you free them from such man-made mess. They will enthusiastically recommend your products to many other equally enthusiastic women. Women constitute about half of the market. If you consider their influence in buying decisions, you will realise that they control much more than half the market.
“Savvy” marketers know this, but only by half. They create and support women-oriented TV soaps and movies. Builders sell houses to women. IBM sells laptops to them. Some companies sell air-conditioners to them and some sell cars.
But an advertisement or a hoarding showing a girl riding a scooter with her boyfriend on back seat is not enough. It is not enough to be politically correct about women. Your products should cater to what women need. Your services should take into account their pressures, sensitivities, and vulnerabilities. Your communications need to be sensitive to them. LG attempted connecting with women. Remember LG’s TV campaign about a child who watches TV in a shop window, when his mother finds him out? This campaign shows that a mother worries about her child’s eyesight due to TV watching. If these are short-term differentiation tactics they might increase sales temporarily but will not help in building a brand.
Your services need to reassure a woman that you will be around in a predictable way when she needs help. If she needs her washing machine repaired, assure her that the mechanic would not just be courteous, but that he would come home at her convenience with tools and cleaning cloth. Assure her that he would leave only after he clears the mess. This is a basic expectation. Women simply care more for these things than men do. If she tries your spices and the dish doesn’t taste quite the way she expected, she will be relieved if she can talk to someone. She might forgive you for some mistakes, if only she can speak what is on her mind and be understood.
Let’s see if well known brands do all this.
Lakme’s Fruit Shock makeup for lips, nails, eyes or skin is said to contain do-good fruit extracts. Its recent print ad is clearly about energy and individuality. Women who look stunning in their fruity, juicy makeup convey this message. Every woman would like to get attention. Looking young is her eternal desire. The energy and individuality of Lakme women set up a desire in her to be like them. The products themselves occupy a small but inviting position in the print ad. Any woman will linger at the ad page and will imagine her wearing the Fruit Shock makeup. But she may not be familiar with all aspects of make up and beauty treatment.
That’s why, since the year 2000 Lakme has been setting up Lakme Beauty Salons through franchisee route. Lakme now has about 70 salons in 26 cities across the country. Lakme Beauty Salons provide professional beauty services. The salons not only make good business sense but they nicely strengthen the brand by completing customer contact and experience. Lakme India Fashion Week provides the top tier of the brand communication structure.
Lakme means fashion. Lakme ignites inflammable needs of a woman - the need for head-turning attention, the need for high-level of color matching, co-ordination and detail, the need for feeling nice about self. Lakme shows her the way to fashion. It’s a heady mix, which few women can ignore. No wonder that Lakme has captured 52 per cent market share of Rs 250 crore organised cosmetics market in India.
Contrast this with what Pears is doing now. Once a warm, translucent brown soap has been now given a cold (mint) and blue personality. A little girl, wishing to look as pretty as her young mom, has given way to a child playing in soil, in danger of germs. Bonding between a pretty mother and her lovely daughter has given way to fear of germs.
Pears, which was associated with tenderness, has been transformed into a weapon for today’s inevitable battle against germs. There is nothing wrong about being a germicidal soap. But isn’t that the position occupied by brands like Lifebuoy, Dettol and now Savlon?
The former Pears articulated needs of women - bonding, sharing, looking and feeling beautiful, and dreaming about all this. But Pears did not go far enough on this path. It did not provide multiple opportunities for women to articulate and share their needs. Beauty, they say, is skin deep. Lakme has strived to fathom its depth. Observe that women wear scarves over their faces when riding two-wheelers to protect them from pollution, breeze, and sun. They do it despite inconvenience. Pears could have built a partnership with women to discover, share, and meet their needs.
We have seen examples of what are known to be women’s products. But why haven’t companies created and marketed products for women in other categories where there is tremendous scope? Take the case of holiday packages. Typically a man, who is the head of family, decides. But his role is usually limited to budget, timing etc. It is his wife who does most of holiday planning and preparation. It is she who has to bear the brunt should something go wrong. All over the world, hotels are gearing up to satisfy needs of women guests. Why can’t tourism companies design holiday packages taking into account needs of what women and families?
Some time back there was a TV campaign by a paint company with a catch line “merawala blue” said by a woman fluttering her eyes. Brilliant. But why stop there? A man pays for the paint, but his wife chooses the colours. She would have to be at home coping with paint men and their mess. What do the paint companies do to give her a real choice of colours? Dog-eared, stained colour cards? What do they do to make it easy for her to visualise how the home will look after painting? What do they do to lessen her burden when her home is under siege? The problem perhaps was that of clarity and conviction needed to provide a comprehensive experience.
Women have different needs as compared to men. They take extra-ordinary efforts to satisfy their needs. A woman will travel to another end of town to buy something like rice, dry fruits, or vegetables if they believe that they are getting something special. Few men will take such efforts on their own.
Women simply do not have enough opportunities to follow their natural behaviour, because most products and services do not recognise their needs. What do women need? At a fundamental level a woman yearns to be understood. The way a woman narrates happenings in a day with the finest of details to anyone close to her holds a significant lesson to those connected with marketing. A woman needs attention. She needs to be listened to. She will be happy to be waited on, to be fussed over.
Small things matter to women. These could be matching of colors, co-ordination of accessories, a texture, or a pretty hairclip. Take care of those small things, and they will shower you with their favours. A woman has an uncanny ability to spot what she wants amidst clutter and chaos. Look at the way women go through the hustle and bustle of shopping areas. A woman will take whatever it takes to get such small things. She does all this to feel herself.
Women have very strong need to enter into relationships; even if they are of the I-love-you or I-hate-you kind. The popularity of the Hindi TV soap “Tu Tu - Main Main” was not an isolated case. Observe how women within a building, a neighbourhood, or a community get together in spite of obvious differences, fights etc. Women care for their surroundings - kitchen, home, or locality. Children are very close to the centre of her attention. Show them something that is genuinely good or useful for their children, and they will be eternally grateful to you. Everyone knows what mess leaky lunch boxes, water bottles, drinking containers cause for a woman to clean up. Let us understand what Tupperware is doing about such problems. Tupperware offers solutions for these problems. Its products can be considered expensive. With traditional marketing and retail distribution Tupperware products would have never got off retail shelves.
Tupperware’s success has many pointers to future. More and more products will have to be introduced, tried, and recommended in non-retail settings. Brands will have to be built in these ways. Mainly commodities, commodity like products, and private labels will move in retail outlets.
If your products, services, and communications combine to make a woman feel beautiful, you have a great opportunity to build enduring brand in her mind. You should enhance her self-image. Women feel beautiful in many ways. It takes earnestness and consistency throughout product cycles to nurture and enhance their self-image. It takes intensity to win their hearts.

Hemant Karandikar’s Exponient Consulting offers intense marketing services, which align consumer understanding, product design, marketing strategy, communications, branding and selling. Karandikar coaches CEOs in strategy and regenerative organisational transformation. He may be contacted at hemant.karandikar@exponient.com

Send feedback to smeditor@indiatimes.com