Brand – Extension (Reference Section…..)

In its 65-year-old history, Dettol, the brand now owned by Reckitt-Benckiser, has seen some seven or eight product extensions — from mouthwash to prickly heat powder. One more — a floor cleaner called Dettol Gold — is being test marketed in Kolkata and Chennai. An anti-dandruff shampoo is also reportedly on the launch-pad.

Now consider this. From Rs 30-odd crore in 1991, Dettol is a Rs 230-crore brand today. This was also the period when most of the product extensions took place. But if you thought this impressive growth was the result of all those hectic product extensions, think again.

Almost three-fourths of today’s turnover comes from Dettol soap, which was introduced in the eighties. The core antiseptic liquid accounts for less than a quarter of Dettol’s sales. The rest — shaving cream, medicated plaster, mouthwash, prickly heat powder, antiseptic cream and so on — make up a minuscule percentage.

Clearly, with the notable exception of soaps, Dettol’s efforts to stretch its brand equity to other contiguous products have been a failure. Though the specific reasons for failure varied in each case, the overall result highlights a unique problem for marketers — the limits of transferring the core values of a powerful brand to other product categories.
Dettol’s brand values as an antiseptic were so strong, that few of the new products were able to assimilate the core properties of its powerful mother brand credibly. This process was tougher because with each extension, Reckitt found itself having to deal with new markets and new competitors in each of them.

To be sure, the decision to opt for product extensions can hardly be faulted. Launched in 1936, Dettol antiseptic liquid was as generic to its category as Xerox became to copiers. There was little that needed to be done to promote it — Dettol’s brand equity was built through sheer usage over the years.

Things were comfortable till as late as 1980 when the first signs of stagnation began to surface. Numerous research studies concluded that though Dettol had a high penetration level and almost all households kept a bottle of it handy, they rarely used it. So to stoke sales, Reckitt (then Reckitt Colman of India) decided to expand Dettol’s usage beyond cuts and bruises.

This resulted in a communication campaign that showed that Dettol could be used as an all-purpose antiseptic — while shaving, rinsing babies’ nappies, as a general disinfectant and so on (students can get a glimpse of Brand widths and widths). Soon, all these uses pointed to a number of possible extensions, a fact that subsequent consumer research validated.
Dettol soap was first off the racks. Strangely, though it may be a winner today, it was not an outright success initially. This was because Reckitt & Colman launched Dettol soap on a premium platform — which was way off the brand’s core properties of hygiene and cleanliness.

When the product bombed, Reckitt quickly relaunched it the following year as a “100 per cent germ fighter” — a positioning that has worked so well that Dettol soap commands a share of 11 per cent of the premium soap market today.

In the mid-1990s, increasing competition within the soap category sent the company looking for a fresh initiative. The major competition now came from Hindustan Lever’s Lifebuoy, which the company was trying to upgrade by introducing it in liquid form in a plastic dispenser.

That effort bombed mainly because the dispensers proved defective and there was a dissonance with Lifebuoy’s value-for-money proposition.

Still, given urban markets’ penchant for convenience products, the soap-in-a-dispenser gave well-entrenched Dettol soap an opportunity to introduce a similar product. According to industry sources, the liquid soap today accounts for over 7 per cent of Dettol soap’s sales.
Dettol liquid soap worked because its contemporary and convenient format actually strengthened the brand’s core values and bought the brand out of the the first-aid boxes into the household. The frequency of usage, too, has substantially jumped over the years.

Encouraged by the successful extension into liquid soap, Dettol added two variants over the last one year — Dettol Extra with moisturiser and a glycerine variant, Dettol Junior (which was launched last month). It is too early to judge the performance of Junior, but company sources say Extra has not been able to induce trials.

No one has ascribed a reason to this, but given the soap’s history, it can be assumed that the moisturiser put Dettol in the beauty soap sphere, where it didn’t quite fit. Retailers say Extra is being clubbed with other Reckitt products as a freebie to induce trials. While this is normal practice with most FMCG marketers, it is also true that Dettol is having to do this more often. Extra’s fate has, in fact, cast doubts on the fate of Junior.

As Jagdeep Kapoor, managing director of Samsika Marketing, a consultancy, points out, when the product offers a single-minded proposition of protection, the brand extension works. “But when the proposition becomes partly cosmetic, the chances of success is reduced.”
In the case of soap, where the extension worked well, the product maintained the core value of protection against germs without cosmetic appeal. But beyond this core area, Dettol is on weak ground. That is why when Reckitt tried to add cosmetic appeal for its soap by adding moisturiserin Dettol Extra, the gameplan didn’t work.

The fate of medicated plasters and shaving creams has, however, been a bit ignominous. In terms of usage, the forays into both markets in the early nineties also made sense. The problem, though, was that the market for both was not large enought to justify the relatively heavy investments that product extensions required.

The launch of medicated plasters, in fact, was more a combative strategy against Johnson & Johnson (J&J) rather than an extension that flowed from market needs. This was around the time J&J had bought the rights to market to Savlon, Dettol’s only rival in domestic antiseptic liquids.

With its traditional turf under threat, Dettol decided to return the compliment by attacking J&J’s hegemony in medicated plasters. Dettol medicated plaster was introduced to coincide with the relaunch of Savlon.


he extension made sense because Dettol had established credentials as a germ protector for cuts and bruises. The problem was that, at just Rs 20 crore, the market was too small. Not only that, this market had a feisty number two in Bieirsdorf’s Handy Plast, which was already giving J&J a run for its money in several markets.

With medicated plaster, Reckitt had hoped to divert some of the resources that J&J would put behind Savlon. True, J&J took defensive action by introducing many variants to Band Aid. Also, its promotion of Savlon was too weak to take this stagnant market by storm.

Thus, once the Savlon threat was over, Dettol medicated plaster vanished from the ads — and so did the aggression that Reckitt needed to put behind the product to sell it in this tough market. This weakened its presence in the retail segment, where the real volumes are. A former senior Reckitt executive says Dettol Plaster has a strong franchise only in clinics and institutions today.

Similarly, the shaving creams market was small (about Rs 50 crore at the time), but Dettol had strong compulsions to get into that category. A study commissioned by Reckitt in 1996 revealed that about 40 per cent of regular shavers used some kind of antiseptic lotion after shaving, and 30 per cent used Dettol liquid. The same study also showed that those who used Dettol didn’t feel the need to use any after shave lotion.
Moreover, the average frequency of purchase of Dettol liquid was once every ten months. That sent Reckitt looking for a product extension that could satisfy the same need and be picked up more often. Ergo why not try shaving creams and gels?

This was logical, but Dettol made a mistake of venturing into a market in which it didn’t have any expertise. Shaving creams and gels are part-utility and part-cosmetic products, and Dettol’s two-in-one proposition didn’t address the latter need at all (after all, no one would have wanted to smell of Dettol after a shave). It was the same mistake that Dettol later made with Dettol Extra.

Not surprisingly, the gel was withdrawn within a year of its launch. The shaving cream is still available, but it’s no star. Since the market for shaving creams has hardly grown — it’s just Rs 70 crore now — Reckitt saw no reason to splurge on advertising for this product.

By 1998, however, there was a desperate need to drive consumption of Dettol antiseptic. The plant at Mysore was, reportedly, working at a capacity utilisation of about 55 per cent. “That was when Reckitt started thinking of a large number of extensions to achieve a higher capacity utilisation for Dettol,” says the former executive.
The company had done everything on the pack sizes front to push sales. This included bulk packs for institutions and smaller bottles for retail buyers. There were even plans to introduce sachets, but this was shelved because the product formulation did lend itself to this form of packaging.

In the mid 1990s, Reckitt tried to balance its product portfolio by bringing in offerings that required regular usage — like floor cleaner Lizol, insecticide Mortein, a re-launched ultramarine blue brand Robin, etc.

Mortein was a great success and accounts for almost one-third of Reckitt-Benckiser’s turnover. But stiff competition in other categories didn’t really allow Reckitt’s other products to quickly grab volumes (Lizol, for instance contributes less than Rs 18 crore even after four years). So, in 1997, to drive growth, Reckitt had to turn back to its top-of-the-mind Dettol.

But the earlier lessons had clearly not been assimilated. In 2000, Reckitt made the same mistake when it entered the talc market with Dettol prickly heat talc. The size of the talcum powder market is roughly Rs 750 crore, but the prickly heat segment accounts for less than 15 per cent of that. Two months ago, Dettol talc was phased out.
To be fair, Dettol’s failures at brand extension are no exception. The difference, however, is the consistency with which its extensions have bombed.

Remember dear students, that There are two aspects to brand extension. One is the brand name, the core properties and its end use. The second is the relevance of the category to which the brand is being extended. Dettol suffered on both counts.

“When brands with a narrow set of values transcend into a functional extension then there could be a problem,”

Pond’s attempts to extend its brand into toothpaste in the early 1990s is a case in point. A strong brand in personal care area was extended to personal hygiene. The brand colours were maintained on the pack, the launch was high-profile, yet the product sank without a trace. There was too much dissonance between Pond’s, the beauty brand, and a functional product like toothpaste.

When brands have values that are as strong as Dettol or Pond’s (which became more circumspect when it came to extensions), companies tend to get into the straitjacket of being forced to function within the parameters defined by the brand.


The dangers of constant failures are obvious. “Companies can weaken the core brand proposition through foolish extension strategies.”

Certainly, the extensions have done little to strengthen the mother brand. This was reportedly a point that the new marketing director, Ernesto Blanch, pointed out when he joined the Indian company this January.

Strangely, while Dettol was extended into different new categories, the company did little to strengthen the mother brand — Dettol antiseptic liquid.

“Can you remember the last time time you saw an ad for Dettol antiseptic liquid?” asks a former Reckitt executive.

Though this probably hasn’t weakened Dettol’s brand image, it hasn’t solved the problem of low usage, as the extension into floor cleaners suggests.

The logic of these extensions are hard to see. Would a housewife, who is being urged to use Dettol Junior as a protective soap for her child or use Dettol shampoo on her hair, agree to use the same brand to clean her floors?
Kapoor of Samsika suggests that these extensions will eventually impinge on the mother brand: “It is like over-squeezing the sugarcane many times over to extract the juice which may no longer be sweet. Hence caution must be exercised.”

Certainly, the company has assimilated some of the mistakes of the past. It has now put aside a quarter of its media spend for antiseptic liquid. But how far this will help its variants is the real challenge.