Personal care is perhaps one of the most mature industry in consumer goods, still the industry is both attractive and challenging. Within the industry, male grooming seems to be the most dynamic category, adding US$4 billion to its global size. Global recession recovery, high disposable income, and high lifestyle spending are said to be the key succes factor for this industry.
Two major product line in male grooming category are hair care and skin care, accounted for 23.5 and 27.2% global revenue share respectively, according to IBISWorld Global. The mature hair care line somehow has been outgrown by the younger fellow skin care, which grow tremendously well during the last decade. Euromonitor explain the issues behind the slow growth of hair care simply because men keep on using the unisex hair care instead, however for the skin care, men are reluctant to use such a feminine product. It seems that how consumer perceive the category is determing key. How such a blurry perception occur in those products?
Perception towards a product usually build by the marketing activity and cultural view. Female and most unisex hair care products always use women as their ads model, thus possible of creating feminine image on the product. However, the most society live in the condition where hair care are used both sex. These contradictive facts result in a gender blurry perception on the product, and socially approve men to buy any kind of hair care. Therefore, male hair care need a lot of perception shift to succeed in general market.
Skin care category, mostly cost higher than the hair care. Therefore the company use a segment based marketing activity, targeting females who are much more promising to buy the product. This marketing activity somehow strengthen the feminine perception on the products, result in mens reluctant to buy the product, despite some of them might be interested with the benefit provided. This demand is captured by the industry, which product “for men” labelled skin care, and socially approve men to buy the product designated for them. This particular thing also happened in the parfum category, which female and male think it is not socially approved to use parfum designated for the other sex group.
Social perception is a very complex matter, and at most cases could be extremely different from one place to another. For example the perception towards male skin care in Thailand and in Indonesia, both located in South East Asia. People in Thailand think it is normal for a guy to use skin care, therefore Thai men are socially approved to buy one. In contrast, Indonesian think it is not normal for a guy to use skin care product. The social culture explain the slow growth of male skin care category, despite Indonesian high consumption habit and heavy marketing activity done by several International brand, such as Vaseline, Nivea, and L’oreal.
In conclusion, male grooming marketing require more cultural understanding instead of certain demographic potency identification. However, men are perceived as simple creature, aren’t they?