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Pears On

HLL's Pears, the original amber one, is using a striking new form of consumer engagement.

Of late, Hindustan Lever Ltd (HLL), India's premier marketer, has had enormous trouble trying to get Indians to buy the chemicals it processes, solidifies and dices out as premium bathing soap. Of course, HLL is not just a manufacturer. It is a full-fledged marketer. In its simplest terms, this means that it sells its soap neatly enrobed in alluring packages --- be it the tangible wrapping, with those slick pack-face designs, or the intangible set of brand values that are conveyed through mass media --- aimed at specific sets of consumers.

That HLL, a grandmaster of the game, has been stumbling its way around the market is reason enough to watch every twist in its attempt to re-attain past form. Pears, its premium brand of glycerine soap, assumes significance for that very reason.

Generations of well-off Indians, particularly those with dry-skin, have been familiar with Pears' translucent amber presence in their bathrooms. Some three years ago, HLL did the unthinkable. In what was touted as a major brand innovation, the company launched a translucent green Pears. Called Pears Oil Clear, it was a specialized variant offering the express benefit of clear skin, and its ad campaign struck the attention it was looking for with its theme of collegiate empowerment (y'know, some fun-fearless-female kinda stuff).

Did it send HLL's soap team into raptures of mutual back-slapping? Information of this nature rarely leaks out of the company. But market watchers have spied success not so much in the actual product, which is a lukewarm seller at best, as in the benefit of clarity it was emphasizing so dramatically.

Yet, HLL's latest move has surprised market watchers. The brand's attention is back on the original amber variant, which, as expected, has been relaunched.

Pears has been relaunched. But not as anything anyone tracing its brand heritage could have predicted. Judging by the latest ad campaign, the brand has taken a quantum leap in sophistication to reposition itself from a mere skincare solution to an agent drawing the consumer's recessed creative personality out.

A brand, do note, can play such a role, and influential brands often do. Pears, oddly, has never claimed such a role before, preferring to stick to primary product benefits. But then, notions of face-care at the market's upper-end have evolved over the years, and such a move away from bland functionality was perhaps long overdue for a brand of its stature. The campaign features a young urban housewife revelling in the joy of mental rejuvenation, freed of supposedly 'grown-up' constraints, mischievous enough, nervy enough and poetic enough to replace her overwrought hubby's tea cup with an inkpot --- to the romantic tune of a lyrical soundtrack penned to define her purpose and convey the sentiment all at once.

Finer interpretations, of course, could differ. What's plainly evident is that Pears, at long last, has grown up. Its very approach to the business of skincare has been rethought. Bravo! Now to see what comes of it.

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