Fair and Handsome launched in 2005, a full decade before the cultural conversation around skin-tone marketing became mainstream. It was the first men’s fairness cream in India at scale, and for 15 years it was Emami’s fastest-growing SKU.
The problem arrived gradually, then suddenly. By 2019, international brands were being publicly criticised for using models with lighter complexions to signal aspiration. Johnson and Johnson discontinued its Clean and Clear fairness range. Unilever announced it would rename Fair and Lovely. The cultural shift was real and fast.
Emami had a choice: defend the positioning with evidence that fairness is a stated consumer preference, or read the shift correctly and move with it. They moved.
How SUGAR Cosmetics built a ₹1,000 crore brand by centering the Indian skin tones that global beauty brands had consistently excluded from their shade ranges and campaigns shows the direction Indian beauty was already moving while Fair and Handsome was still at its peak.
The rename was surgical. Smart and Handsome kept the same packaging structure, the same retail presence, the same distribution. Only the brand name changed, and with it, the entire communication platform. “Smart” meant confidence, achievement, and grooming. Not complexion. Not fairness. The product formulation was rebranded as a skin-purifying cream.
The approach required significant nerve. ₹500 crore of brand equity had been built under the fairness positioning. Rebuilding under confidence meant abandoning the very claim that had made the brand the market leader.
But the alternative (defending a positioning the cultural tide had already turned against) was worse. Fair and Lovely’s eventual rebrand to Glow and Lovely confirmed the direction. Emami had moved six months before HUL did.
How Britannia navigated the challenge of updating a brand’s emotional register and target consumer without losing the loyal existing consumer base it had built over a century shows the same strategic tension: how much can you change about a brand before the loyal consumer feels abandoned?
Smart and Handsome’s market share held. The rebrand was largely invisible to existing consumers and invisible-by-design to cultural critics. Three years in, the brand’s revenue continued growing, now under a positioning it can own for the next 20 years without defending.
How Patanjali built a ₹10,000 crore brand on a single positioning before that positioning showed its operational and cultural limits shows the risk of the alternative: brands built on cultural moments that pass face existential risk when the moment passes.
