HUL Spices Up The Skin Care Market: Launches Vaseline Confidence Challenge

The Rs. 3,465 crore Skin care market in India is seeing some action now. HUL, which has a basket of  brands like Fair & Lovely, Ponds, Vaseline and Lakme, owns about 47.8% of the market is now targeting the online population of India to promote its brands .Recently the company announced the launch of “Confidence challenge” (Vaselinebodyvibe.zapak.com) for its age old brand Vaseline (launched in 1870). The company has partnered with Zapak.com for this new initiative.

The contest is:

1. User register themselves at vaselinebodyvibe.zapak
2. They select their body vibe based on 4 different categories and upload a full length picture.
3. 4 participants are selected from each category.
4. The participants are sent Vaseline healthy white lotion and are supposed to upload there pic every week showing the effect of Vaseline lotion.
5. Finally winner is picked up from the each category and gets different prizes based on category .

The company is targeting women in the age group of 18-25 years.

Zapak on its side is promoting the contest through

1. Banner ads on its home page
2. On the log out pages of various games
3. Its network of Gameplex.

Interestingly zapak which is supposed to be a gaming company, has often deviated from its core competency.

The portal claims that the micro site has already received 1.48 lakh registered users and 1.45 million page views so far. The website is receiving approximately 521,105 page views every day (figure from cubestats.com). The company reportedly chose zapak since “Zapak with its expertise in the online space offers complete creative digital solutions to brands “ said Mr Arun Mehra, Chief Marketing Officer Zapak Digital Entertainment Limited.

The product (Vaseline) has a wide presence across the world with even a Facebook page.

It has a fan following of more than 22,000 people worldwide.

HUL is not using this strategy for the first time, earlier, in April and May; the company had used Yahoo, MSN and India times to create awareness about the launch of a new product.

Since HUL Has been steadily losing its share in the Indian market across all sectors with its market share in skin care coming down from 60% in 2007, 52.2% in 2008, 47% now in a skincare market which has shown a growth  from Rs. 1200 Crores to the current Rs. 3465 Crores. These initiatives do show the company is willing to fight it out with its competitors (L’Oreal India Pvt. Ltd, Proctor & Gamble, Emami Ltd and CavinKare).