How Bombay Shaving Company is staying razor-focused on reaching out to young consumers

From common household grooming products to becoming comfortable choosing their own personal products, young consumers, women and men alike, are shaping consumer trends observed in the personal care and grooming category, as per Gauri Malhotra, Chief Marketing Officer, Bombay Shaving Company. 

This insight has paved the way for Bombay Shaving Company’s communication strategy. The D2C brand, which began in 2015, has shaved off its old logo recently with an aim to be ‘Bigger, Bolder, Sharper’, especially with its recent announcement of scaling up its physical distributions from the present 70,000 to three lakh in the next 24 months and wanting to be IPO ready by 2025. 

The revenue in the Shaving market amounts to US $3.81 billion in 2023 and is expected to grow annually by 1.92% (CAGR 2023-2028). The brand aims to expand its wings through new product launches and focusing on razors.

However, with Gilette being synonymous with razors for the men’s grooming category, Gauri Malhotra shares how the brand is speaking to young consumers through entrepreneurship.

Edited Excerpts:

As Bombay Shaving Company enters a new chapter with a fresh brand identity, what does your marketing plan entail to promote the same?

One of the things that we wanted to kind of do very strongly was narrow down our focus segments and what you will see us do a lot more of is focus on our end-to-end hair removal. 

From a consumer trend perspective, the relationship of men with hair has changed over the years; there's a very obvious shift. Earlier, men would just shave. Today, there is shaving on the face, there are different beard trends and there's also hair removal on the body, which is a whole new thing for men.

As this spectrum and consumer behaviour changes, at Bombay Shaving Company, what we want to do is own hair removal and give consumers the best experience to remove their hair, whether it's on the face or on the body, and really occupy a really large share of the body for the consumer from a strategic standpoint. 

This is a great time to move our identity in line with the same, both in terms of boldness, edginess, the ambition and build it for young India, new India, because that's where these trends are the fastest moving. 

That's our marketing thinking and the reason for moving to a new identity. 

Could you share insights into the market research conducted before the rebranding process? What were the main findings and how did they influence BSC's market positioning and marketing strategies?

There are two forms of insights. One is understanding what's happening in popular culture because that's a big window into how larger narratives are being shaped and how the culture is changing. 

If you look at Bollywood movies from 20 years ago, you will have men flaunt their chest hair, and you never saw men in gyms with bare chests and clean-shaven bodies. But in popular culture, that's very different today, with men depicting themselves in a different manner. 

That's one window into already what the consumer is feeling. Young men of today are far more active from a lifestyle standpoint, they are engrossed in going to gyms, taking care of their bodies, and wanting to look good and feel great. There’s this whole dimension where a man taking care of himself is just growing in importance manifold. 

The second is, of course, going and meeting consumers. 

While we have a lot of products in the shaving space, like shaving foams and post-shave balms, we also thought this was a good time to introduce more end-to-end solutions. In the shaving business, razors are a difficult category, it requires having a tight marketing mix and the pole position is held by one large incumbent. 

We are excited about the proposition that we have and razors are one category that we're going to play aggressively in. 

We have just launched a hair removal spray, which is a far more convenient way of removing hair for a few men. So that's really how we've married the insight into the portfolio strategy and how we're building on the entire hair removal range.  

How does BSC identify and target specific customer segments, and how has this approach evolved over time to ensure better customer engagement and satisfaction?

For us, one of the large opportunities is to speak to young India. We categorize them as early shavers, or people who are just starting their journey with experimenting with their hair. 

This early shaver cohort, typically, 16-17 years to 25-26 years old is the core audience that we want to build for and go after. 

We also believe that this audience leans towards brands, that don’t just offer them products, but also help them in their journey to kind of be well-groomed or better-shaped. 

Being a D2C-first brand, content is core to our marketing strategy. 

Talking to these consumers and educating them on how to shave, how to trim, how to style, and what is the best razor for them is something we are going to be very focused on. 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Bombay Shaving Company (@bombayshavingcompany)

Can you share some of the challenges involved throughout the brand's marketing journey?

I wouldn't say this is a challenge, but one of the large spaces that we are getting into is Razors, which is owned by a large incumbent. For us, how we play in this space is supercritical and important for our success and growth as we go forward. 

It is a challenging category, and as we were creating our razor range, we went deep talking to consumers about what is it that they need, to early shavers on what are their apprehensions when it comes to shaving. And a couple of things have come to the fore, which are quite the bedrock of our Razor launch. 

One is that if you talk to young consumers, they are actually quite afraid of shaving. They are afraid of shaving because skin at a young age is sensitive. 

The second is there's nobody they can speak to about shaving. Therefore, we are launching a range of six razors. And the proposition for a Razor range called ‘Sensi Smart’ is that they are ‘sensitive on skin’. 

Sensi stands for ‘sensitive for skin’, and smart stands for a smart choice. It’s for INR 99, and from a pricing standpoint, it fills in a void currently in the market. In our primary research, we have seen that consumers love the bundle and the price point fits. 

We are also giving consumers a lot of smart choices; we are giving them a razor sharpener, and consumers buy razors, but they do not like spending again and again on cartridges. For us, we want to be consumer-first. 

We are excited about the product proposition; we are also equally excited about the content that we are building for this consumer because they really need hand-holding on how they can shave and the products they can use. 

Talking to the consumers and giving them a full repertoire of products is what we focused on. We are obviously going to be spending a lot of time and effort taking this range and proposition out to the consumer.

Social media platforms have become vital for engaging with consumers. What innovative strategies has the brand employed on social media to effectively connect with its target audience and drive brand engagement?

A lot of discoverability for young consumers happens on social since they end up spending a lot of time on Instagram, Reels and YouTube. We have played this strength to our advantage to launch razors in a different way. 

What you will not see from us is a classical piece of advertising, which is playing on TV or at different touch points and taking the more conventional integrated marketing approach. 

What we're actually doing is turning marketing right on its head and combining two very strong ethos, which are fundamentally social first. 

One is the social-first podcast - ‘The BarberShop with Shantanu’, a property that founder and CEO, Shantanu Deshpande has been anchoring for the last year. It started with the premise that India and young India wanted to know more about entrepreneurship and he wanted to make it more accessible and real. 

One of the feedbacks that we have received is that they want our help in experiencing entrepreneurship because there's a difference between hearing about it and actually doing it.

For phase one, we have launched a marketing campaign called Razorpreneur, which is essentially a take on the old adage called ‘sell me a pen’. We are flipping that to the ‘sell me a razor’ challenge. 

We are helping young India to go out there and test their selling skills because we strongly believe that selling is the most fundamental skill to being a successful entrepreneur. 

In phase two, we will actually go down to campuses and colleges and do a live challenge between college students and Shantanu and see who can beat Shantanu at his own game and actually be a better Razorpreneur. 

There are going to be significant rewards at the end of it, which will include the top Razorpreneurs featured on the BarberShop itself, and also some of the top ideas getting funded by Shantanu and him putting seed capital into the ideas. 

What role does taking a D2C and omnichannel approach play for the brand?

For any brand that starts expanding beyond its first zero-to-one journey, an omnichannel approach does become critical. 

While we do have a certain segment of society that shops online, a lot of FMCG still gets shopped from offline channels. We are already an omnichannel brand and have a presence in about 65,000 outlets. 

For the online strategy, D2C and e-commerce remain our strong courses. But when it comes to offline, going to modern retail, then to larger general trade stores, and percolating deeper from there is going to be a natural extension into taking our category to more consumers. 

If you were to break down BSC's overall marketing strategy into a few buckets, what would be some of the common patterns they follow? 

I think portfolio focus and building our strength in hair removal by having a large enough portfolio and leading the innovation in the hair removal space is one strong plank for building a long-term successful business.

The share of the body is one metric that we want to start tracking, whether it's razors, foams, face wash, or trimmers, we want to own most of the repertoire that the consumer has when it comes to hair removal or grooming. So that's one cornerstone of our marketing strategy. 

The second core is content. This generation wants to know more about products and regimens. Having a strong content-first approach is something which is built into the ethos. 

We will continue to strengthen that, whether it's putting out information from the brand end or collaborating with influencers that are relevant to us. Those are the two critical planks for us as we build and strengthen the brand along with appealing and making sure that we remain relevant for young India.

How much percentage does the brand spend on marketing?

We are talking to a sharp audience and to reach them we do have selective channels. We are very digitally leaning right now. 

Are we only digital? No. Are we digital-first in the way we spend and speak to the consumers? Yes.

Just to give an idea of our traditional approach, we collaborated with Rajasthan Royals (RR) during the Indian Premier League (IPL) and created a custom-made collection ‘Exclusive Royals Edition’. It included customisable smooth razors, trimmers with names engraved for a personal touch, a fragrance and a deo spray collection named 'Jodhpur' (amongst others). 

When we launched, we realised we wanted to go deeper into the Rajasthan market, which has a great affinity to the RR team. We did print and radio at that time to build a stronger impact.  

With the larger focus on marketing razors to the younger cohorts by touching upon their various pain points, Bombay Shaving Company aims to be consumer-first with its rebranding, concludes Gauri Malhotra.