Godrej Consumer Products wants to work on expanding market presence: Ashwin Moorthy

Ashwin Moorthy, the Chief Marketing Officer of Godrej Consumer Products Limited (GCPL), is looking to expand the company’s presence and market penetration as he feels that per capita consumption of their products can be further improved.

“We are among the top five advertisers in India, with our ad spends being 10-12% of the total expenditure. We believe in the power of market development which is why we want to expand the penetration of our categories across the entire brand portfolio. I feel the majority of our portfolio is still under-penetrated and even under-consumed in terms of per capita,” he said in Mumbai on Friday, on the sidelines of the launch of the new molecule of his mosquito repellent brand-Goodnight. 

Investing now in market building and educating the consumers will not only lead to growth in sales in the short term but also in building stronger brands for the future, he shared.

Marketing the brand 

Products from GCPL stables like Hit, Good Knight, Cinthol and Aer already have a very strong brand presence and recall value. Moorthy feels that as a marketer he looks at the consumer perception of the brand very seriously, and works around it. In categories like soaps and household insecticides, the conglomerate holds the number 1 and number 2 position in India respectively. 

“Working with such a big width of products ensures that work is fun. A product like Good Knight, for example, is used by a third of Indians, so one has to ensure that scale in the marketing interventions. At the same time, we keep launching innovative products like Hitmatic for which there is a niche customer base,” he said. 

He added that the wide product portfolio allows a marketer to try to solve different consumer problems. At the same time, there is also the chance to build categories such as air care and liquid detergents, that he is currently spearheading.

Ad spends

With a product portfolio which is as wide as that of GCPL, the ad spends of the group are pretty high as well. 

Moorthy gives the example of the soap category to justify this high expenditure. “Soaps is one of the most invested categories in the country in terms of TV media. It is a competitive category and hence you must be competitive to make sure consumers find your brand salient. Insecticides and mosquito repellents are categories where we feel the onus had been on us to build the market,” he said. 

He said GCPL spends a lot of effort on building the category like they are currently doing for air care. The group is, in fact, the only large advertiser in air care moulding consumer behaviour.  

Moorthy said this is the reason for the group’s high ad spends. While they still spend a majority of it on TV advertising, digital channels are also being utilised well. 

Making campaigns in-house

A lot of the campaigns for Godrej products have been conceived and executed by GCPL’s in-house creative agency called Lightbox, which Moorthy said was set up with the idea of getting creativity closer to the business. 

“The creative team here works very closely with the team who runs the brand. They are working in tandem with each other and are accessible to each other. For example, in the latest Good Knight campaign they decided we should be honest and compare it with our own previous product and say it is twice as good. Very few agencies would tell their clients such a thing,” he said.