Liril woos the family

Stung by the sharp fall in the premium brand’s market share, Hindustan Unilever has dropped the girls to pitch for family intimacy. Will the new campaign wash?

Before she stopped bathing under a waterfall, Karen Lunel made sure that the Liril ad caught the nation’s imagination. The ad with its famous jingle “la-i-ra-li-ra” ran for 12 years since 1975 and single-handedly catapulted Liril to one of the top-selling soaps with a 14 per cent market share.

The waterfall, the bikini and the jingle continued, though Lunel, who had by then become an icon for the brand, was replaced by an assortment of stars such as Preity Zinta and Deepika Padukone. But the new ads were seen to be merely an echo of the original film. So the 'Liril girls’ finally bowed out in July this year as the freshness soap’s market share plummeted to just 1.3 per cent.

 

Since rebranding was the desperate need of the hour to revive the old magic, Liril became Liril 2000  and Hindustan Unilever (HUL) launched a new campaign that stresses family intimacy and speaks about 2000 sensitive points in the human body that teh soap refreshes and rejuvenates.

An HUL spokesperson says the “emotional space” being addressed by the Liril of the seventies was no longer relevant to the Liril consumers (urban women in the higher socio-economic class) of today.

The soap now has a different packaging – the earlier tight-wrapped cover has been replaced by a box-type packing and the light green colour has given way to a darker shade and gloss finish. HUL says it represents “a fundamental re-engineering with an improved product in a contemporary shape and has the signature Liril perfume”.

Ad gurus say it was high time that Liril did something different to survive. The waterfall and the bikini served their purpose at a time when women’s liberation was taking wings. The Liril girls had then broken new grounds in the sense that they took bathing out of the bathroom and turned it into a fantasy. But that became irrelevant in today’s Facebook and FTV era.

In the interim, HUL tried its luck by launching a few variants like Liril Orange, Icy mint, etc, which didn’t quite pick up. Harish Bijoor, CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc, says “variants are essentially bells and whistles products. Most of the time they just add to the advertising zing but very little to top-line sales volume. Though they are necessary, they just come and go.”

The company also briefly moved the account to McCann in 2007. It came back to Lowe Lintas early this year. Lowe offered the ‘relaunch’ cure.

Joseph George, executive director, Lowe Lintas, says, “In the last decade, freshness has become generic to the personal wash category and lime and lemony fragrance is being used by any and all brands. The task therefore was to leverage Liril’s premium heritage and find a new consumer benefit in skin cleansing to make the brand relevant to its audience once again.”

“Today, the premium end of the skin cleansing market is moving to skincare benefits. So, we looked at how we could re-interpret Liril’s core equity of freshness in the context of skincare. The added new benefit of soft skin (due to Aloe Vera) allowed us to offer a unique combination of fresh, clean and soft skin. In communication, this translated into ‘Every part of the body becoming clean, fresh and touchably soft’,” George adds.

The advertising has thus gone off from celebrating “individualistic pleasure” to “family intimacy”. But George denies any brand confusion: “If the new proposition is relevant and compelling, people will accept it. Having said that, it is true that “freshness” is still at the core of the new proposition,” George says.

The agency says the target audience remains same. “Liril was never targeted at the youth; it was a brand that had a youthful imagery. In order to broadbase our appeal, we are now talking to the entire family. However, we have retained the youthful imagery of the brand and have  broadbased the appeal to the entire family.”

The rebranding is being seen to address the loss of market share. Anand Ramanathan, Manager, Business Performance Services, KPMG, says, “With  time, the choices available to customers have increased. Liril had started losing market share, whereas other soaps like Lux and Lifebuoy have increased/maintained their shares consistently. HUL has taken the Liril girls out of its brand image in order to improve the worsening scenario.”

Besides refreshing the brand, the repositioning makes sense from the portfolio management perspective, too.

Naimish Dave, Director, OC&C Strategy Consultants, says, “It will ensure an efficient deployment of HUL’s brand portfolio in the personal wash segment. With Dove at the super-premium end, Lifebuoy at mass-plus and Lux at mass price points, it is obviously a conscious decision to reposition Liril to target the premium soaps segment.”

However, experts like Bijoor think Liril has now taken the safe route of building an intimate bond within marriages.

But the new strategy of positioning the brand as being clean, fresh and intimate with the family can also be perceived by the market as boring routine.

Watch this space.