Godrej Consumer Products (GCPL) is focusing on expanding its product portfolio in the mid-priced hair colour segment as part of strategy to cement its lead in the category instead of competiting with French cosmetic major L’Oréal’s super premium brands like Garnier and Excellence. Godrej doesn’t plan to enter the segment for now.
The companhy is lining up its research and development investments towards developing newer technologies in mid-price hair colour segment.
Hoshedar Press, executive director and president, GCPL said, “The number of consumers using powder hair dye is still very huge as powder hair dyes are much cheaper. Hence we will continue to develop products in the popular, sub-popular and premium categories.”
For GCPL, hair colour is the second biggest business for the company making up 23 per cent of its net sales in the last financial year.
Also being one of the most inflation-resistant categories in the fast moving consumer goods sector, GCPL plans to launch more products periodically in this space in the coming months, said Press.
The powder hair dyes, make up 50 per cent of the Rs 580 crore hair colour market in India. However, in terms of volumes it makes up an even greater share of 75 per cent of the total market, said GCPL. The rest of the market is made up of cream based hair colourants, which are catching up fast among the affluent consumers.
GCPL is still the market leader in the overall category with a share of 35.2 per cent. Although its share has gone down in the last six years from 43.9 per cent in 2002 as many players both global and local have entered the Indian market since then like Schwarzkopf and Cavin Kare.
L’Oréal, which entered the Indian personal care market in 1994 has already garnered a share of nearly 20 per cent from local hair dye brands with its cream based colourant Garnier.
Whereas powder hair dye satches are available at a price as low as Rs 9 per sachet, cream based colours are priced in the range of Rs 80 to Rs 100 and super premium brands like L’Oréal’s Excellence cost about Rs 500 per pack.
GCPL’s focus on powder hair dyes also resulted in the relaunch of its largest selling powder hair dye Godrej Expert. Witnessing higher growth rates in the premium colour segment the company also launched the powder hair dye extension of its cream based colourant Renew this year.
Matching up with competitor L’Oréal’s aggressive marketing strategy, GCPL then roped in bollywood celebrity Katrina Kaif as the brand ambassador for Renew. GCPL’s other hair colour brands include Anoop, Kesh Kala oil, permanent liquid hair dye, Kali Mehndi and Colour Soft.
Industry experts say that only 20 per cent of Indian women use hair colour in India compared to 90 per cent in developed markets.
In value terms as well, the hair colour market is just one-tenth of the soap market in India, which is in sharp contrast to world over where hair colour market is double the size of the soap market. This makes hair colour category much under penetrated one in the country.
