Clear vision?

Bausch & Lomb has adopted a three-step strategy to increase market size.

Of the 17 million people with vision imperfection in Indian cities, only 800,000 use contact lens. This is less than five per cent of the potential market for contact lens. The ratio is higher in other Asian countries such as China (18 per cent) and South Korea (30 per cent). While the paltry penetration of contact lens in India makes for huge scope to grow the Rs 120-crore market, it also underlines the formidable task ahead for the players in the contact lens market.

For Bausch and Lomb, the industry leader, the battle then is not for market share but how to grow the market size. Making a start in urban India, it has chalked out a plan to increase the number of trials, which could lead to higher conversions to contact lens, in order to expand the market.

It is a three-step strategy – train in-store optometrists, set up the right ambience at the stores and seed them with counsellors – that Bausch and Lomb has adopted to increase the size of its primary markets in the cities.

The low market penetration can be attributed to two reasons. While consumers are held back by myths of putting an alien object in their eyes, optometrists associated with eye-care stores lack the knowledge to convince customers of the benefits of soft contacts lens.

A market study the company did with AC Nielsen across the top 20 cities in the country showed that more than 50 per cent of store opticians didn’t find it easy to convince a spectacle wearer to switch to lens and over 60 per cent of them felt training on contact lens would help them.

Termed the ‘Mastermind Plus’ programme, Bausch and Lomb has tied up with the International Association of Contact Lens Educators in Australia to launch an e-learning platform with eight modules, spanning six months.

Bausch and Lomb Managing Director Harish Natarajan says: “The choice of the outlets was important as we didn’t want to tie-up with people who would pay mere lip-service to the initiative.” Hence, 140 shops from the top 10 cities were chosen. The 540 optometrists from these 10 cities who have already cleared it are now armed with not just a certificate but also the confidence to recommend contact lens.

The optometrists trained by Bausch and Lomb would not only be better able to wean users off traditional contact lens (almost 60 per cent of contact lens users fall in this category and don’t use soft lens), they will also concentrate on prescribing the right pair of lens for a customer.

Natarajan points out the importance of the perfect fit: “In terms of glasses, it is not such a task to find the right fit. But when it comes to contact lens, it is a different proposition.” He puts this as a major reason why of the seven per cent who try contact lens in India, only seventy per cent stick to the category.

But for a regular wearer, a Bausch and Lomb study revealed that it was one of the top five items on his shopping basket. The lens-wearing habit thus in place, it is now down to bringing more users into the category to reach the target which Natarajan puts at Rs 500 crore in the next three years.

Explaining why 80 per cent of the training course is about the generic category rather than Bausch and Lomb lens, Natarajan says, “At this stage we would be more than happy to grow the category responsibly and if more players come in and work in the same direction.” Optometrists certified by the company thus, would be free to recommend any brand of contact lens.

Branding for Bausch and Lomb would come in with the later stages of the strategy. It will deck the shops to highlight that they have a contact lens expert on board, and then station its own vision-care counsellors in the stores to further encourage trials. Its initiative has already yielded an average increase of 50 per cent in sales in certain lens categories in the stores.