How Revlon got sold in Rural India

Audio

I was surprised, that washing machines , are used to blend yogurt smoothies in India. When they have such population, blenders may not work!!!.

However , I know another story which is equally incredulous. This happened when I worked as an intern, at Revlon’s India office. Revlon wanted to introduce hair color in India and after careful market studies we decided to test two colors. Black and Brown. Almost all the Indians have black as their hair color and hence introducing brown was strongly opposed by the team. However since we wanted to test the reaction of India to an unnatural hair color we decided to keep brown option open. I was asked to lead the test market for brown color. I somehow felt that I was being setup for failure!!. The project given to me was to decide which shade of brown was the best shade to market. I created three shades. Dark brown like chocolate, a medium shade of brown that looked like dry leaves and yes.. a blond color. My logic in creating blond color was that it may get some corporate sponsors in Bangalore, particularly in a firm that encouraged employees to talk and behave like mainstream Americans. So I stuck to my shades and got the approval to test these three shades of brown on technology crowd in a software company.
We took 300 packs each of these three shades, dark brown, light brown and blond colors and went to technology campus of the test company. I will keep the name of the company a secret and call it Sikkapatai Important Company. We set up our counter near Domino pizza outlet inside the food court at the company and waited for the response. The first week we had a sale of 2 packs of chocolate brown and lo and behold! three packs of blond color!!. This was unusual and was proving my theory that technology crowd at Sikkapatai Important Company have secret desire to become blonds. However, my manager discounted this and said may be the blond colors were bought by some of the many expatriates working for the company. Next week we sold 12 packs of blond color!!. May be more expatriates were rushing in, to buy the shade that was not traditionally available in India, said my manager!!. Next week, I left for Delhi to finish my project and head back to America. When I reached Delhi the test market data for that week was in my inbox. We had sold 286 boxes of blonde color and we were out of stock midway between our test market study!!. Test report also said the employees who were buying were not expatriates!! Revlon had to fedex blond shades from America to replenish test market stock and next week we sold 400 cases of blond color.
Next week we took off to Mumbai to see Ganesha festival. After the Ganesha festival suddenly the demand vanished. We also did not see the employees sporting their new hair color. Why they bought the color but were not using it, was a mystery! The sixth week I had to finish the study and submit the report. So, I collected the data from earlier weeks and analyzed it. Off the 300 boxes sold from the first batch , 280 had been bought by two individuals from Rural part of the state. I remember the name of their town as Channapattana. I was surprised that two individuals bought so much of hair color. I happened to get an appointment with one of them, the other had gone to U S on a short assignment. Both had the same story.

The first individual belonged to an agricultural family and he was first one in his family who tried something else other than agriculture. He seemed very uncomfortable interacting with a white woman like me. I was curious to know what he did with hair color? He said they were cattle merchants and bought and sold cows in Channapattana Cattle fair during the month when Ganesha festival is held. He explained that blond cattle fetched more money than other colored cattle!!. He also explained that cattle can be dyed using hair color and buffaloes are regularly colored to pitch black to get premium prices. He hit upon an idea to use the blond color on cows because cows are liked if they are blond colored!!! So his family bought colored cattle in the fair and colored them blond and sold them at premium!!!

Enclosed: Images of a cow salon in Channapattana where such cow laundering is done. The colored cow near the salon door is yet to get the color treatment. The cow standing in front is a happy customer after the color treatment. The tanks contain Revlon blond solution. Image courtesy: Our undercover operators in Sikkapatte Important Company