“The brand has resisted all temptation to play around with meaningless brand extensions and stayed within the scope of the brand.”

Says Vineet Agrawal, President, Wipro Consumer Care & Lighting, “Santoor grew 29 per cent last year and has been growing at a CAGR of 25 per cent for the last three years while the industry has been growing 3-5 per cent.” Toilet soaps is a highly penetrated category so growth in the Rs 6,160-crore category at 5 per cent is slow. A Rs 500-crore brand, Santoor contributed the bulk to Wipro Consumer Care’s revenues last year of Rs 818 crore.

While this division of software major Wipro has been diversifying its product mix into baby products, lighting equipment and solutions and now furniture and low-calorie sweeteners, it’s Santoor, an amalgam of key ingredients sandal and turmeric, which has come to be closely identified with the company. K. S. Ramesh, a long-time FMCG marketer with P&G and former CEO of CavinKare Pvt Ltd, says that the Santoor brand has displayed a certain amount of strategic consistency over the years.

“The brand positioning and advertising has seen no gimmicks and has built loyalty. The brand has resisted all temptation to play around with meaningless brand extensions and stayed within the scope of the brand.”

Santoor, while launching a sandal-and-milk-of-almonds variant in the northern markets, has extended the brand to face and hand washes and talcs. Now, the brand is trying to break out of its traditional stronghold and make quick gains in other markets. It roped in actors Saif Ali Khan to endorse the brand in the North and Madhavan for the southern markets last November.

Says Kumar Chander, Vice-President, Marketing, “Saif is helping in changing the perception of the brand in the northern belt. Suddenly our recognition scores have jumped and consumers have started looking at Santoor much more favourably.” The new white Santoor, he says, has also contributed in enhancing brand imagery and is also being liked for product per se. “Our gains are great, but the base is small,” he adds. In the sandal soaps market, Santoor competes with the likes of Mysore Sandal, which is a premium brand at much higher price points, and Rexona sandal. What explains Santoor’s dominance of the AP market, the largest in southern India, which is a Rs 2,027-crore market for toilet soaps? AP constitutes a Rs 819-crore market, followed by TN at Rs 545 crore and Karnataka at Rs 468 crore, with Kerala making up the rest. As a former senior official of the company recalls, when Wipro was spending on the brand in the South, it was AP which showed the biggest gains and the company decided to put its marketing muscle behind the brand in that state.

Says a prominent retailer in the South: “Santoor has done very well for us in AP. Wipro has been quite a low-key but focused player – the narrowness of its product range has been an advantage for it as it has been able to focus on fewer products.”

As Chander explains, the success of the brand in Andhra has been linked to its improved understanding of the customers in the southern States. “We find in research that cultural differences exist even between housewives in the four States and we have been able to leverage these cultural nuances in communication to our advantage,” he elaborates. Wipro has also tried to be ahead of the competition in its core states. For example, with the trade, it started with better margins, then competition matched that, so it moved to exciting promotions, which was again replicated, so now it has moved to retail relationship building. “Fragrance selection, skin feel, bathing experience can take up to a year to craft for every re-launch and are meticulously researched. We have practically been re-launching the product every two-three years and improving it every time,” explains Chander. Once Wipro identified what unique elements worked in each State, Santoor quickly gained market share.

“Maharashtra and Karnataka are two States where our market share gains in the last three years have been terrific,” he adds. Also, as Agrawal, Wipro’s President, points out, as soaps is a highly penetrated category, the challenge is not so much against other brands, but to increase usage per person, especially in the rural areas. While people in rural areas bathe as frequently as those in urban, the former may not use a soap with their bath.

Meanwhile, Wipro has also been pushing ahead with Chandrika ayurvedic soap, a brand it acquired a few years ago. The ayurvedic soaps segment is around Rs 227 crore by value with Rs 146 crore in the South. “However, we believe that Chandrika competes with all popular soaps and not only with ayurvedic soaps,” says Kumar Chander. Chandrika has a market share by value of 5.5 per cent in Kerala and around 1.5 per cent in the South in the total soaps category. “It is a heritage brand, and we believe it has huge potential,” he adds.

The category is further complicated also by the fact that the market is constantly changing. A few years ago, consumers were downtrading, there were price-offs, offers, cheaper soaps and it was perceived that only the sub-popular segment was growing. However, today, the premium category has diminished as the gap in quality between premium and popular soaps has narrowed while the contents in terms of TFM (total fatty matter) are also the same now while prices between the two have narrowed with the earlier excise differences going.

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