[Marketing Mantra] Comfort Fabric Conditioner - Re-Conditioning

[Loganathan Arumugam]

With two years of Test Marketing in Tamil Nadu market, HUL has launched Comfort Fabric conditioner in Indian market in the year 2008. Fabric care market in India is at a very nascent stage and HUL guessed for the potential market for this kind of Fabric Care market well in advance. HUL has well prepared to launch this brand in the Indian market just because of the reason that it is altogether a new category for the Indian consumers who have never used anything other than the detergent powders or the bar or liquid blues.

 From the day-1, HUL has taken much care in promoting Comfort Fabric conditioner and started with an animated ad campaign in which Cloths speak with each other on freshness that they enjoy by using comfort fabric conditioner. The message was crystal clear and reached well, however along with ad-campaigns HUL started sampling the brand along with Surf and Rin in the market which helped the brand to reached the households of India which has got a Fabric Cleaning market size of 12, 700 crore rupees (Source: Business Standard). With hardly any competition in the market, Comfort Fabric Conditioner has tried the next level of promotions and came out with a Cloth World concept through which it challenged the market for 14-days freshness in cloths to show the competitive advantage of this brand. 

The Cloth World campaign to my knowledge is not a great one which has just made the TV screens blurred with blue texture. The message and the feel hasn’t reached the market leaving the Indian audience on why they should use this product, I mean product here because the basic utility for this category hasn’t reached the prospective crowd. The consumers are familiar with Rahul and his girl friend but how far this duo has favoured the Indian consumers stayed as an unanswered question. There is no point in brand building when the product hasn’t identified the scope in the market. Not sure, whether HUL has realised this in the recent days, which has pushed them to do a massive correction in the way that Comfort fabric conditioner has been promoted all these days. Yes, there is no more cloth world and no more Rahul challenging for 14 days freshness in the Indian media.

The correction campaign roped Madhuri Dixit in North and Jyothika in South to promote this brand by talking about the use of the product in a simple way. Though this campaign has been started from the mid of this year in the Northern parts of the country, the South Indian crowd has started getting the clarity product through the ad endorsed by Jyothika which is aired in the recent days.

This will definitely bring some quantified benefits to the brand in-terms of revenue through increased sales. 

The Comfort Fabric Conditioner story is a great case study for HUL and for other marketers to promote the category/product first if it a very new category then moving to the brand building activities that facilitates for the sale in the market which is aware of the actual utility of the product.

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Posted By Loganathan Arumugam to Marketing Mantra at 10/15/2011 11:25:00 AM