How Santoor’s unique promise made it India’s favourite soap

Which is the No. 1 soap brand in India? This is not a trick question. It is not Lifebuoy or Lux or Dove or Dettol or Cinthol. Wipro Consumer Care just announced that after clocking a revenue of Rs 2,850 crore, they believe Santoor is today the No. 1 soap in India. Why am I celebrating?

Santoor was launched by Wipro in the late/mid-1980s. The brand moved its advertising account to Ulka in the late 1980s. I started working on the brand in 1994 and had a small role in the brand’s growth from 1994 until 2016.

When I started working on Santoor, it was not even among the top five soap brands in India. Brands such as Lifebuoy, Lux, Nirma, Hamam, and Rexona were all way ahead.

How did the brand manage to achieve this miracle against the toughest of tough FMCG players, HUL? I can probably write a long-form article on this, but let me try and summarise in a few points.

Wipro Consumer Care did not try to boil the ocean. In the mid-1990s, when the brand sales were probably Rs 50 crore, they had to make do with just Rs 5 crore as an ad budget.

Instead of scattering the money all over, they decided to focus the ad efforts on a few states. AP to start with. Karnataka / Kerala followed. Maha/Guj after that.

The company did not dismiss Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets as difficult to cover. They went wide, and they went deep.

They knew their consumer was upgrading from unbranded soaps. So they offered value-for-money packs like the Rs 10 pack.

The brand stayed true to its colour and identity. While many brands went through multiple packaging refreshes, Santoor stayed pretty close to what was their iconic pack for two decades. Yes, small changes were made, but nothing drastic.

Product experience is critical. In the case of soaps, you need to have great experience during and ‘post bath’. Santoor improved the product quality and kept upgrading the perfumes.

Finally I come to the role I played in this soap opera. The brand was built on the insight that every woman, moms included, wants to look young. The brand had latched on to the ‘younger-looking skin’ promise.

And unlike many clients who want a new campaign every year, Wipro wanted the agency to look for ways to interpret the promise in new ways. Which we did to the extent we got noticed and praised even by our competitors. 

So let me end this post with a quote from Mr A. G. Krishnamoorthy, founder of Mudra Advertising. “What separates one brand from another is its unique promise of value, and this is what the customer hooks on to. But if the message keeps changing from time to time, the customer (and others) will no longer know what the brand stands for and what to expect. Which is why consistency is almost like a lifeline for the longevity of any brand…(Santoor) is special because with every new release they manage to add freshness and newness to the same old thought.”

(Ambi M G Parameswaran is a Brand and CEO Coach, Brand Strategist, and Founder of Brand-Building.com. With 45+ years in marketing and advertising, he led FCB Ulka as CEO/ED, transforming it into a top agency. He has built and coached major brands such as Santoor, TCS, ICICI Bank, PepsiCo, and Tata Motors.)