It’s now a given that Bollywood stars launch their own beauty or clothing brands, but audiences aren’t always on board with these ventures. Are we seeing a lack of authenticity, or is it simply too much of the same?
Fame vs. Success: The Reality of Bollywood Celebrity Brands
Bollywood success through a brand does not always translate to having something work. Even famous celebrities, such as Deepika Padukone‘s ‘All About You’ and Shahid Kapoor‘s ‘Skult’ and Anushka Sharma‘s ‘Nush’-so famous that everyone in India has heard of them-even those brands seem to almost disappeared after much noise. There are hundreds of celebrity-owned brands now, whose success varies vastly in the Indian market.
For example, the sales of Virat Kohli‘s youth fashion brand WROGN declined 29.2% to Rs 243.75 crore during FY24 from Rs 344.3 crore in FY23. Skincare brand 82°E from Padukone too saw revenues at Rs 22.82 crore for the first nine months of FY24 as against Rs 11 crore in the previous year; however, the EBITDA loss was shocking at Rs 25.1 crore.
On the other hand, brands like Katrina Kaif‘s Kay Beauty are doing just fine. With Nykaa, the brand has attracted over 1.5 million customers and features among the top three searched brands on the website. Alia Bhatt‘s kid swears brand, Ed-a-Mamma, revenues quadrupled at Rs 16.2 crore, an acquisition majority stake of Reliance Retail has invested. Fitness brand HRX from Hrithik Roshan, which has grown multi-fold, crossed the revenue mark of Rs 1000 crore.
Brands have reaped success because of brand identity and quality in products that speak to their audience, like Kay Beauty and HRX. WROGN and Salman Khan‘s Being Human are examples where the brands did not reap the results, due to market saturation and poor brand positioning being a significant failure point.
Red Flag Celebrity Brands
According to experts, effective celebrity brands emphasise long-term growth, authenticity, and quality. In contrast, celebrity brands that fail are overly dependent on the celebrity’s name without any good business plan. When brands build an identity too significantly based on one celebrity, it starts to feel artificial or unreal to the consumer because this generation of consumers is highly interested in establishing authentic connections with products.
According to YouGov’s latest survey, only 45% of consumers do not believe in the beauty industry’s celebrity endorsements while 28% believe in beauty products only if celebrities own them. Many reported awful experiences with celebrity-owned beauty products, such as overpricing and low quality. Deepika Padukone’s 82°E was criticized for being highly overpriced. For instance, sunscreen is selling at Rs 1,800, moisturizers are sold at Rs 2,700.
However, the mass market takes the lead while demand for high-end skincare is rising. And since the beauty and personal care market stands at an estimated $28 billion for 2023, experts note that this brand equity alone isn’t enough to keep consumers interested.
Consumer Fatigue and Market Oversaturation
Consumer fatigue has seen one of the most prevalent causes of it in recent years namely, celebrity-led brands. When is it getting difficult to tell the difference between brands or even celebrities between social media endorsements and tell-all bombshell interviews? Industry professionals claim that most celebrities who have brands have done so strictly for short-term cash injection as opposed to having actual long-term success. It is for the simple reason that these brands are not innovative and hold little to no value.
Shivashish Tarkas, The InterMentalist founder says that one of the main reasons why celebrities push out a brand is to augment their personal value or simply to remain in line with the needs of the market without necessarily researching the Indian market at large. He advises celebrities to focus more on investment rather than simple and superficial product endorsement but rather let the brand speak for itself in terms of quality rather than association with celebrity status.
In a nutshell, celebrity brands may work well for generating buzz at first but authenticity, quality, and a connectivity with the needs of the consumer will have to sustain the success.
