Some 25 years ago, noted lyricist Indeevar wrote a song, “ Jab se hui hai shaadi ”, a peppy number about a privileged wife and a helpless husband for Raj N Sippy’s film Thanedaar . Here, the wife is pampered with silk and crystals, sips red wine and smokes a cigarette. The husband, in typical Hindi cinema overstatement, is in torn drawers and an even more torn vest. So, under the circumstances, when the heroine — played with grace by Madhuri Dixit — goes to the bathtub, how does she pamper herself? With Lux, what else! And the lyrics go, “Woh Lux mein nahakar khushboo mein tar rahegi”. That was the ultimate statement in luxury.
Luxury, indeed, was the idea behind Lux, actually a short form of the word ‘luxury’. Though targeting the common women, Lux was always positioned as an aspirational product. Hence, instead of focussing merely on maters of hygiene, the ad campaign communicated to the potential users that Lux was “the beauty soap of film stars”, the underlying message was that Lux made its users more beautiful.
Lux always used film stars to drive home the point of luxury, a soap that is not meant just to clean the body but it actually a sensory cake, a bar to indulge in. Amazingly, Lux did not start as a toilet soap, or as a bathroom soap, as soaps were called till about 70 years ago. It was launched as a laundry soap in 1916 and took a little under a decade for the bathroom soap to make an appearance. Even then it was not called so. Simply dubbed Sunlight Flakes, it was then rechristened Lux in 1929.
How the “bathroom soap” became the “beauty soap of film stars” was a marketing masterstroke. Back in the pre-Independence era, it used film stars who had a transcendental appeal. Leela Chitnis and Shyama were among the early brand ambassadors.
After Independence, Lux continues with its unique selling point of luxury that was affordable. Hence on the one side, film stars like Madhubala, Nargis, then Meena Kumari and Waheeda Rehman wondered aloud about the secret of their beauty, and then themselves provided the answer, “Lux, aur kya”; on the other, the soap was priced in the medium range to make it affordable for the middle class. At a time when Moti, Pears and Mysore were considered upmarket soaps, Lux tapped into the middle class dreams. The strategy was the reverse of what Surf was to use in the 1980s when it made its higher price is strength by questioning those who compromised on their clothes by buying a cheaper washing power.
It wasn’t, however, that Lux was resting content on the brand association it had assiduously cultivated since the beginning. In the late ’70s when Hema Malini and Rekha, Zeenat Aman and Parveen Babi were in a race to occupy the slot of a dream girl and fantasy girl respectively, Lux brought them together for brand endorsement. It carried forward the process begun in the ’60s when both Helen — one of a handful of instances of a screen vamp endorsing the soap — and Nanda — the perennial sister of the big screen – promoted Lux one after the other. It, in turn, was a mix of what the brand conveyed in the early years. Its black and white era heroines like Leela Chitnis talked of preserving youth with Lux, its first girls after Independence, beginning with Madhubala and Nargis, added the fantasy element to the chore. The soap became a sensorial tool.
Hindustan Lever was clearly not ready to let go of any target users! Further, not wanting to limit the brand’s appeal to only commercial cinema admirers, it brought the thinking man’s heroine Shabana Azmi on board too.
The strategy reached a newer level in the ’80s and ’90s. In the ’80s, Sridevi and Jayaprada were locked in a race to the top.
Lux shrewdly signed both the stars. This time the popular catch line “Lux, aur kya” was changed to “Who’s No. 1?” A few years later when Madhuri Dixit and Juhi Chawla had dislodged Sridevi from her place, Lux again brought all three together; the underlying message was, ‘all film stars use this beauty soap’.
By then endorsing for Lux had become a style statement for heroines. Any heroine who had had a decent run endorsed Lux, and she didn’t, she was not deemed to have been anywhere near the top!
So, right from Leela Chitnis to Sharmila Tagore and Saira Banu on to Aishwarya Rai, Kareena Kapoor and Katrina Kaif, everyone endorsed Lux.
