Local flavour: How condom marketers are making their bid

Bharat buys condoms, it doesn’t buy brands,” says Anupam Ghosh, proprietor of Anondita Healthcare, a Noida-headquartered manufacturer of surgical and household gloves, as well as the product for which it is perhaps better known in northern India.
Anondita sold some 117 million pieces of condoms last fiscal year, making it the largest regional condom player in India. The apparent distrust in branding, though, hasn’t stopped Ghosh from resorting to some not-so-subtle labelling of the three offerings from the Anondita stable: Cobra, Enjoy and Midnight.

These three brands enjoy a 5 per cent market share in the regional condom market, in which a heap of about 300 local labels had a collective 22.3 per cent share in April this year, according to Nielsen data sourced from industry officials.

In a market in which Mankind Pharma’s Manforce is the leader with a share of just under 31 per cent, the “others” category of local brands comes in at No. 2, followed by Moods and Skore.

What is more, while every national player experienced a dip in sales over a year ago, the regional ones grew by 6.1 per cent. The 39-year-old Ghosh has also emerged as one of India’s biggest third-party manufacturers for local, branded players who clearly share Anondita’s penchant for in-your-face branding.

Some of the brands that source from Ghosh’s production hub are Vigora, Force, Ek Lamha, Barkat and Tamanna. Local brands, claims Ghosh, have been silently expanding their reach across the smaller cities, towns and villages. And the clout of national players matters little in non-urban India — or is only as much as that of the local labels — simply because brand loyalty is an alien concept in the condom-purchasing universe.

The unmentionables?
Men in semi-urban and rural areas are still by and large conservative when it comes to buying condoms.

“There is a sort of embarrassment attached to it,” says Vishal Vyas, general manager (marketing), TTK Protective Devices, maker of Skore brand. Hence people try to minimise the transaction time at the shop and tend to take whatever retailers offer them.

This makes a condom marketer’s job tough as all the efforts to convince a consumer to buy your brand come undone at the time of buying, explains Vyas, adding that while each of the local brands commands a minuscule share, it adds up to a significant number overall.

“The retailer has the power to influence the choice of a consumer and this makes consumers less loyal to brands,” says Vyas. Most of the regional players rely on a push from the trade to notch up sales.

Om Garg, 73-year-old chairman and managing director of Cupid, India’s largest maker of female condoms as well as the largest t h i rd - p a r t y manufacturer is best placed to explain why retailers rule the roost in pushing the sale of condoms.

“Ranveer Singh can’t sell a condom; a shopkeeper can,” says Garg, obviously taking a dig at global giant Durex, which has the Bollywood star as brand ambassador. In April, Durex had a market share of just 1.7 per cent as per Nielsen data. If branding matters so little, why then do regional players leave little doubt of the category they are in when labelling their products.

Cupid, for instance, manufactures condoms for local players that have resorted to names such as Masti, Zaroor, Zaroor Time Max (talk about brand extensions), Play Boy and XXX Stamina. Not to be undone, Cupid has its own brands like Bull, Stud, Fantasy and Cupid itself. For good measure, Cupid also exports to 36 countries from its facility in the Sinnar industrial estate of the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation.

It is not viable for national players to penetrate deep into the hinterland, says Garg, who lost his eyesight because of diabetes. Accessibility is the key, he says. “The most crucial cog in the wheel is the shopkeeper.” The margin that the brand offers him decides which brands get pushed. “It’s purely a margin game.”

Domestic players

Anupam Ghosh, founder, Anondita Healthcare, Noida, Uttar Pradesh
Company-owned brands:
Cobra: Started in April 2003. Sells 6.5 million pieces per month
Enjoy: Started in August 2004. Sells 1.36 million pieces per month
Midnight: Started in December 2013. Sells 1.72 million pieces per month
Manufacturing for other brands Vigora, Force, Ek Lamha, Barkat, Tamanna, Nirodh. Made condoms for Manforce and Cipla for a few years.
Top five markets: UP, Delhi, Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh.
Revenue: Rs 37 crore in 2015-16.



Arun Sharma, cofounder, Soliel International Healthcare Products, Rohtak, Haryana
Company-owned brands
Trishna: Started in February 2006. Sells 0.85 million pieces per month.
Gets products manufactured from Aabha Contraceptives in Pune.
Top five markets: Rajasthan, Punjab, Haryana, J&K, Madhya Pradesh.
Revenue: Rs 7 crore in 2015-16.



P Srinivas, cofounder, Population Health Services India, Hyderabad, Telangana
Company-owned brands
Thril: Started in June 2002. Sells 4 million pieces per month
Fire: Started in March 2005. Sells 4 million pieces per month
Kamagni: Started in January 2009. Sells 1 million pieces per month
Top five markets: Gujarat, Assam, Manipur, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh
Revenue: Rs 40 crore in 2015-16



Om Garg chairman and managing director, Cupid, Nagpur, Maharashtra
Company-owned brands
Cupid: Started in June 2016. Sells 0.42 million pieces per month
Bull: Started in April 2001. Sells 0.06 million pieces per month
Stud: Started in April 2001. Sells 0.02 million pieces per month
Fantasy: Started in December 2006. Sells 0.09 million pieces per month
Manufacturing for other brands Masti, Zaroor, Zaroor Time Max, Play Boy, XXX Stamina. Made 89 million pieces in 2015-16. Target for 2016-17 is 133 million pieces
Top five markets: Mumbai, Delhi, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh
Revenue: Rs 62 crore in 2015-16. Target for 2020 is Rs 110 crore

A reason for the proliferation of local players, explains Garg, is the low entry barrier. The cost of production of a condom ranges from Rs 1 to Rs 1.50. While the maximum retail price of a pack of three is capped by the government at Rs 25, the local retailer gets the maximum margin from the regional players.

At times, the margin is as high as Rs 15 compared with Rs 5-6 offered by the national labels. Ranju Mohan, business director at JK Ansell, maker of the Kamasutra brand, agrees: “Retailers’ influence in pushing the brands with the highest margins has helped regional brands grow.”

In a market in which the retailer is king, outsourcing of manufacturing may not be a bad strategy. Arun Sharma in Rohtak, Haryana, has been doing that for a decade now. The 64-year-old cofounder of Soliel International Healthcare Products sells some 0.85 million pieces of the Trishna brand per month.


The product is manufactured at Aabha Contraceptives in Pune, and Trishna is available mostly in northern states, up to Jammu & Kashmir. According to Sharma, the massive push by the Indian government over a decade ago to promote condoms by providing subsidies to NGOs gave an impetus to local brands.

Various NGOs made it a business and came up with their own brands to avail of huge subsidies, he claims. The flip side of the flurry was that quality took a backseat. Sharma doesn’t think retailer margin is the only reason for the success of regional brands, pointing to performance and quality (“our brand will never burst and increases the ecstasy period as it is properly medicated”) as two important factors that influence purchase.

But why doesn’t he manufacture his own brands? “What’s the point?” he asks. “If one can get good-quality products at a reasonable price, then why invest in a manufacturing set up?” Marketing experts point out that bigger condom companies wrote a self-fulfilling prophesy of creating new and localised competitors in the market when they withdrew from third-party manufacturing.

Every ‘third-party’ first looked for another big brand to manufacture for, and when that was not found, they invested in creating and marketing their own brands in the local market, says brand strategist Harish Bijoor.

These were manufacturers who had got used to high-quality standards. They just moved on, invested in building brands that appealed to the local masses, and got the distribution game going, he adds. Bijoor feels that regional brands resonate with local imageries, depend heavily on sensuous visuals and position condoms as accoutrements for pleasurable sex.

They do not talk the language of HIV and protection from pregnancy, as much as the language of fun, right from packaging to the product itself. “These, at the end of the day, are the only fun brands in a rather staid and stodgy retail market environment,” adds Bijoor. Another factor which has helped them is almost zero advertising and marketing costs.


“So they win on local distribution,” he says. Devendra Chawla, president (brands, food and FMCG), Future Group, feels that marketers too must be blamed for failing to develop brand loyalty.

The coy consumer
Modern trade, which gives an excellent platform to display condom brands and communicate with consumers in a most private manner, contributes a meagre 2-3 per cent when it comes to the sale of condoms. “Marketers have largely relied on traditional network channels to push sales rather than tap into modern trade,” he says.

Chawla says that in spite of all the boldness in condom advertisements, the reality is diametrically opposite: Indian men are still shy when it comes to engaging with this category as a shopper.

In fact, most of them don’t even buy condoms from their own locality for the fear (and guilt and shame) of being identified. Back in Noida, Ghosh of Anondita feels that the coy consumer behaviour is not going to change anytime soon, which is good news for the local brands.

Ghosh is busy at work at his production unit, keeping a watchful eye on whether the dong-shaped glass moulds are getting double-dipped in a tank of latex. Once the moulds cool, a blast of water strips the condoms of it.

Next, the condoms are dried and ready for packaging, explains Ghosh, adding that he has a bigger manufacturing unit in Mathura in Uttar Pradesh. “People smell the coffee, I smell the rubber.”