The beauty and skincare industry has seen a spurt in popularity in the past few years since consumers are becoming more conscious about their choice of products. Unsurprisingly, skincare brands have been growing at a rapid pace. One such brand is JOY Personal Care, which is a part of the RSH Global brand. A homegrown brand which has been operating for more than three decades, it holds itself true to being a fearless company and standing up for women’s rights. They have a whole range of products dedicated to acid attack survivors.

Poulomi Roy, Chief Marketing Officer of RSH Global, spoke to e4m about the brand, what the next year looks like and the future of the skincare industry in India.

Excerpts:

Tell us about JOY Personal Care as a brand and how it began.

This company started in Kolkata around 35 to 36 years ago approximately as a homegrown company making personal care products, and more so it was from a trading perspective. In the year 2011, when the business kept growing in demand, the company thought of getting into mass media advertising to ensure more increase in product sales.

2011 is when the first television ad of Anushka Sharma went up. In the year 2015, we realized that while we are advertising, we need to have a more strategic approach to it. So that's when they decided to change the face of the organization from a trading to a marketing perspective.

Once we did that, the turnaround of the brand happened. We figured out a space called "Beautiful by Nature." We realized most women have this innate pressure in themselves to look a certain way and behave a certain way. We then said, "Why don't we do something? Why not make this brand speak a language which will make them stop and think about themselves?"

So, we focused on making products that help in maintaining beauty and not accentuating beauty.

Then we spoke about the way advertising has, over the years, sold the wrong notions of beauty to women in India. That's more or less been the journey.

What kind of marketing techniques has worked for the company in the past and what kind of advertising are you looking at for the future?

It has been 5 to 6 years since we have actively started marketing. Our competition is from the multinationals to the new-age brands of the world. I think the awareness that JOY has created in the last five years is purely because we have been fearless in terms of what we speak and what we stand for.

During the pandemic, we distributed one lakh sanitization products to the sex workers and transgender people of Kolkata. We made a film that talks about the ways beauty has been sold to women across India for many years. We have taken digs at ourselves as the so-called skincare industry, the beauty standards imposed on women and the way we have been portraying beauty.

That worked in our favour, but we still have a long way to go for sure.

The beauty and skincare industry looks at a lot of promotion through influencer marketing. Does JOY have plans on venturing into that?

I think in the last couple of years, we have seen an influx in boutique products that are made and sold through social ecommerce.

This space of personal care has a lot of subtexts in it. So we are into FMCG but we are into personal care of FMCG and skincare to be precise. We've always had the luxury and the budget to use mass communication as platform to promote ourselves. Fortunately, or unfortunately, the last couple of years have seen a lot of people making niche products or products which are made for specific needs in the beauty space and they didn't have the bandwidth to use television. So their first option is to go by social ecommerce, influencer marketing and all.

There is an influx of digital, but what is the relationship? If you look at any medium agnostic of your brand, each is doing right.

How much is the influence of those mediums on my consumers? I do a filtration to decide whether we will go with influencer marketing and content creator or take my brand and advertise where the content is being created. In a larger way, I understand what roles they are going to play in the life of my brand.

There is no denying the fact that influencer marketing has been growing, but we as a brand started off from there (television) and then there are these new-age mediums.

I need to decide and understand and acknowledge the fact that how much of it is affecting my consumers.

Do you see a rise in your adex budget for next year?

Yes, year after year we have been increasing our budget. Currently, I say it is over Rs 100 crore that we spend overall in every aspect of marketing.

What do you think of the future of the skincare industry in India?

Consumerism is on the rise everywhere across all industries. We will see a lot of disposable income as a part of being in the skincare industry. I think there will be a lot of personalisation and creating new needs for consumers. People's regime will also comprise the use of more skincare products. They will start to realise that it's important to use products from trusted brands and not just use any product that is trending in the market.

We will have geographical expansion with deeper penetration into spaces like West Bengal and Maharashtra. We'll be introducing new products and also have a manufacturing unit in the works. There will also be a third, larger manufacturing unit, but it will take some time, a couple of years, to set up as well. So, in terms of product offering, the influence of infrastructure and marketing endeavours, these are lined up for us.