Johnny Sins agreed with Bold Care's vision to talk about men's sexual health: Rajat Jadhav

India has no doubt come a long way when it comes to speaking out loud about sexual wellness, well, at least about women’s sexual wellness. 

What is still a relatively more ‘hush hush’ topic for the country is men’s sexual wellness, which is a crucial yet underrated category that is still under wraps most of the time. 

In a recent conversation with exchange4media, Rajat Jadhav, the co-founder and CEO of Bold Care shared that while globally, the average age of men facing problems sexually ranges between 45-50 years, in India that age range comes down to as low as mid 20s to early 30s.

“But at the same time if I ask you what’s a good sexual health brand in the country, nothing really comes to anyone’s mind; there are no top-of-the-mind recall solutions created,” he added.  

Bold Care, the brand that recently found itself in the centre of numerous conversations over the viral Ranveer Singh & Johnny Sins ad, picked up from the very insight that anybody (even somebody like Johnny Sins who has an extremely positive image when it comes to sex) can find it difficult to perform in bed. “When we told Johnny that this is what we want to do, he said that this is what we need to do to get the message out there in the right way possible,” Jadhav mentioned.  

However, it wasn’t always much of a joyride (pun not intended) for the brand, when it started off. Bold Care was conceived in 2019, and was launched in July 2020. Jadhav said that back then, this category was close to non-existent. To top it off, payment gateways were not offering services for sexual health companies based out of India because there was an assumption that most of these companies were fraudulent. “Along with that, some major marketplaces were not onboarding Indian sexual wellness brands. But that situation has fully flipped now,” he added.  

Beyond business-led challenges, there also came a range of marketing challenges in the sexual wellness category. As Jadhav pointed out, there are a lot of platform restrictions when putting out something around this category, be it in the ATL space or the BTL space. “It is difficult to do it in the neatest, cleanest way possible. So we follow a policy of ‘don’t show skin, to sell’ to keep it that clean,” he said.  

According to industry reports, India's sexual wellness market size was valued at $1,153.5 million in 2020, and is estimated to reach $2,095.4 million by 2030, registering a CAGR of 5.8% from 2021 to 2030. While the numbers might seem big, the conversations around the same still seem to be quite small. For instance, Jadhav says that unlike mental health, sexual health is in its very early parts of inflection point, where just some initial murmuring has started.  

“Maybe it is not as comfortable for men to start going and talking about it openly, but what we are hoping for and are trying to do with Bold Care is if they're not able to talk openly about the problem statement, at least internally with themselves, they're more confident about this problem statement,” he further explained.  

Another consumer trend in this space, according to Jadhav, is that since the age bracket of men facing these problems is quite young, and they have grown up in the internet era, they are seeking solutions that truly work and not just go with any random products that promise them the world.  

The brand, which is quite digital-heavy, goes big on leveraging social media to reach these consumers. And it isn’t doing so by creating attractive reels or hopping onto random trends, but by putting out educational content about sex and sexual health. However, Jadhav also mentioned that Bold Care does face the consequences of being on this track, considering that without the educational content the page’s reach could be higher. “At the end of the day, it’s all about the algorithm. So it’s a mix of both educational as well as fun and edgy content,” he said.  

Amidst other social media strategies, influencer marketing has been a key part of the brand’s marketing strategy. Ranging from Sex Educator Seema Anand to content creator Sanyam Sharma aka sharmajikabaddabeta, Bold Care roped in influencers to highlight the brand’s SKUs or educate the consumers. However, going by recent reports, especially one released by influencer marketing platform klugklug, over 60% of the Instagram followers of nearly 2 out of 3 Indian influencers are fake.  

Speaking about such risks, Jadhav noted that the brand chooses to collaborate with only those influencers whose content have a significant reach, instead of going just by the number of followers. “Based on our strategy of doing things, we choose not to collaborate with micro or nano influencers. We work with mega influencers with a certain amount of engagement,” he said.  

The brand’s rest of the media mix is mainly, again, skewed towards digital, Jadhav shared. “Most of our spending is on digital. In the online sphere, across most marketplaces, we are out-competing even the legacy brands right now. So a lot of our marketing is focused on digital.”

Delving deeper, Jadhav mentioned that initially the split used to be 80% performance marketing and 20% brand awareness building. But that split has now come to around 40% for performance marketing and 60% for brand building.  

As far as the revenue split is concerned, the brand is seeing an even split between D2C website, e-commerce and q-commerce.