Manufacturer banks on ‘jeans’ to promote condom sales
Reckitt Benckiser Group Plc is betting on a new marketing plan to promote condom sales in India.
A combination of factors that includes; societal stigma, illiteracy, taboo and unmet need for family planning has kept condom use to less than 6 percent of contraceptive methods in the Asian country.
It is said that jeans are easier to buy than condoms in India, a country also battling the world’s third-highest HIV burden.
The two-condom packs, which sell for 25 rupees (38 cents), are in packaging resembling the leather badges sewn on denim jeans, and displayed in jar-like bowls on drugstore counters. The packaging makeover is aimed at helping consumers overcome the embarrassment of buying a product linked with sex — a taboo subject in conservative India.
“Asking for Durex Jeans should be cool,” said Rohit Jindal, marketing director for Reckitt in India said.
“The whole package is made to normalize sex and condoms.”
Condoms are a stigmatized topic in India, where promotion and open discussion about their use are considered inappropriate, Sangram Kishor Patel, a senior researcher at the Population Council in New Delhi, and colleagues from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai wrote in a study last year.
“It is a good step to promote the usage of condom in India, where condom purchases are fraught with psychological stigma,” Patel said.
India’s National Family Planning Programme introduced condoms as a way to manage pregnancies in the late 1960s, and promoted them also as a method of preventing sexually transmitted infections in more recent decades. Still, of adult women in India aged 15-to-49 years in long-term partnerships, only 6 percent rely on male condoms for contraception, compared with 46 percent in Japan and 8.3 percent in China, according to United Nations data.
