Advertising
Shaving away brands
Philip Kleinman
When economic times are uncertain, as one need hardly say they are now, retailers are not too keen on carrying big stocks. When stocks are reduced it is likely to be the small-selling products which are tossed out and the staple brands which get any good the ill wind is blowing.
An apt illustration of this process is provided by a market we touched on in this column a little while ago and which I personally find full of interest. That is after-shaves. The latest figures available from the research firm AGB indicate that in the spring Shulton, the toiletries company which makes the Old Spice range of after-shaves, shot ahead, increasing its share of the estimated £13 million market to 21 per cent, against 20 per cent for Faberge and 18 per cent for Avon,
This is quite a turn-around for Shulton, whose former dominance of the market has been overthrown in the last four years by the other two biggies. AGB's Toiletries and Cosmetics Purchasing Index (TCPI) gives the percentage shares of the market achieved by the three during the whole of .1973 (in terms of cash sales, not volume) as Faberg e and Avon 18 each and Shulton 16.
It seems safer to take the TCPI
figures for brand shares rather than the somewhat different ones sup-. plied by the A. C. Nielsen company, which are also much quoted in the trade. Nielsen figures are based on an audit of sales in a given number of retail outlets but take no account of Boots, which AGB reckons to supply half the retail market in after-shaves, or of direct selling operations. (Avon products are, of course, sold door to door.) TCPI figures, on the other hand, are derived from information collected from a panel of 8,500 consumers, selected as a cross-section of the population.
Shulton's recovery, if one is entitled to speak of recovery on the basis of a two-month period, has clearly not been at the expense of the other two members of the after-shave triumvirate. Ian Forsythe, the firm's marketing director, believes that it must be the smaller fry who have suffered, and there are many small fry among some fifty different brands of after-shave to be found in the shops.
The biggest manufacturer in the second division of after-shaves is Unicliffe, with its Hai Karate and Censored brands which together took nine per cent of the market last year,, according to the TCPI. It is followed by Yardley and Goya (Cedar Wood brand), each with four per cent, and Cussons, with three per cent. Unicliffe is in the first division when it comes to after-shave advertising expenditure, however; it spent £240,000 on Hai Karate in 1973, second only to Old Spice's £600,000. This year Old Spice is likely to spend £800,000.
Faberge, with its Brut and new' Faberg6 West brands, has, on the other hand, put comparatively little effort into media advertising. Last year it spent only about £40,000 promoting them that way. The image of Brut has been built up, instead, by a blend of imaginative — some would say phallic — packaging, intensive point-of-sare promotion and a policy of restricting distribution to 4,000 "exclusive" outlets. (There is also, of course, the small matter of the smell, which ater-shave marketing men are sufficiently proud of their products to think makes a difference.) If you think Brut's long-necked bottle is more calculated to turn a woman on than a man, you may well be right. The most important fact about after-shave purchases is that a majority of them are made not by men but for men by women, particularly at Christmas. This gift aspect of the product no doubt accounts for the emergence of the high-priced Brut as last year's brand leader. It also accounts for the success of Avon, which sells direct to housewives.
It will be interesting to see .whether Old Spice, in the lower price bracket, will be able to maintain its current progress or whether, come Christmas, when Unicliffe, you may remember, will be pushing its still-to-be-launched expensive Casablanca brand, the ladies will have knocked its share of the market down again.
One unresearched question, incidentally,. is how many bottles of unopened after-shave are stocked in people's bathrooms. At AGB they guess it could be a great number.
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