Wild Stone: Building a Masculine Brand Positioning in India's Deodorant Market

Industry & Competitive Context

India's deodorant and fragrance category grew rapidly through the 2000s and 2010s on the back of rising personal grooming spend among urban and semi-urban men. Wild Stone is owned and marketed by McNROE Consumer Products Private Limited (MCPPL), a Kolkata-headquartered FMCG company founded in 1986 by Narendra Kumar Daga, which began with the talcum powder brand Heaven's Garden before entering the deodorant category with the women's brand Secret Temptation in 2006, followed a year later by Wild Stone, its flagship men's range. Mcnroe was incepted in 1986 in Bhadrak, Orissa, with Heaven's Garden talcum powders positioning the company on India's FMCG map; the company relocated to Kolkata and in 2006 launched female body deodorants under the brand Secret Temptation, and the rapid acceptance encouraged the introduction of the Wild Stone range of male deodorants the following year. Wild Stone started with ₹28 crore in revenue in its first year, and McNROE crossed ₹100 crore in overall revenue in 2009, going on to log over ₹400 crore in revenue within roughly a decade.

The category itself was described industry-wide as large and fast-growing: one industry teaching case placed the Indian deodorant market at approximately $1.2 billion, with growth led by the male grooming segment, and noted Wild Stone held a national market share of around 7.4% at the time despite limited presence in South India, against a leading player that commanded more than 50% share by targeting young men. By the late 2010s, McNROE described itself as being ranked among the top two to three deodorant players nationally on Nielsen data: McNROE was among the top two deodorant companies in India according to Nielsen AC data for March 2018, and by Nielsen's March 2019 report, the company was among the top three deodorant companies in India, with a market share of about 9 percent. Competitively, Wild Stone operated alongside HUL's Axe, Vini Cosmetics' Fogg, Paras's Set Wet Zatak, and Denver, in a category where as one contemporaneous industry commentary observed most players had converged on similar creative templates. Almost all men's deodorant brands in India had adopted the same "women chasing men" positioning theme, including Axe Fuel, Denver, and Set Wet Zatak. A significant category disruption came from Fogg's "no-gas," higher-quantity-of-perfume proposition, which reshaped consumer expectations around value and product format industry-wide from the early 2010s onward.

Brand Situation Prior to Repositioning

Wild Stone's earliest brand identity was built around overt, provocative sexual suggestion. The brand's original tagline was "Wild By Nature," and its advertising in this phase was explicitly "wild" and drew controversy for being sexually explicit, generating negative word of mouth even as it succeeded in getting the brand noticed. This is corroborated by independent academic analysis of the brand's positioning during this period, which found that Wild Stone's products were targeted at the "uber-masculine male who loves living life on the edge," with the brand marketing itself as masculine and mysterious to a target audience of men aged 22–28, and campaigns built around a recurring theme of seduction in which women were depicted making the first move toward the user. The same analysis found that this positioning had measurably registered with consumers: when target consumers were asked to describe users of the brand, 48 percent described them as young and 47 percent associated them with muscular attraction, alongside attributes such as adventurous, wild, confident, and attractive.

By the late 2000s, however, industry commentary noted the brand was recalibrating this approach. Wild Stone's marketing mandate had passed to the agency Future Brands, and the brand shifted from its earlier explicit tone toward a "subtle" execution that retained sexual overtones without their original controversy, introducing a new tagline, "It Happens," in place of an earlier "Barely Legal" line, intended to signal that the "Wild Stone man" did not have to try too hard. This shift illustrates a brand consciously moving its expression of masculinity from confrontational, controversy-courting cues toward more understated confidence, while still operating within the category-wide "attraction" trope common to Indian deodorant advertising at the time. Independent commentary on the brand's advertising has also noted that Wild Stone's execution carried more narrative depth than typical category advertising: most Indian deodorant advertising followed a template of a man spraying deodorant and women noticing him, and while Wild Stone's approach was not drastically different, its campaigns carried a storytelling depth that set it apart, playing on the psychology of attraction rather than physical appeal alone, with fragrance names such as Edge, Hydra Energy, and Forest Spice designed to evoke character rather than a generic freshness claim.

Strategic Objective

Drawing on the verified record, Wild Stone's positioning evolution over roughly two decades reflects three sequential objectives rather than a single campaign:

1. Category entry and cut-through (2007 onward): establish rapid awareness in a market dominated by larger multinational and domestic competitors, using bold, high-recall (if controversial) masculine imagery.

   
   

2. Brand maturation and risk management (from the late 2000s): retain the brand's core masculine, "wild"/confident equity while reducing the reputational risk associated with overtly explicit advertising, moving toward a more "approachable" execution.

   
   

3. Premiumization and regional expansion (2016 onward): extend the brand upward in price and refinement through the Wild Stone Code sub-brand, and deepen penetration in geographies particularly South India where the brand had historically been under-represented.

   
   

By FY23, the Wild Stone brand accounted for around 69% of MCPPL's total revenue, reflecting the concentration of the company's advertising spend on this flagship brand, while the women's brand Secret Temptation contributed around 13% of total sales. This revenue concentration is consistent with the strategic priority placed on defending and extending Wild Stone's core masculine positioning as the company's primary growth engine.

Campaign Architecture & Execution

Phase 1 — "Wild By Nature": provocation as differentiation

Wild Stone's initial advertising used explicit, seduction-themed narratives targeted at men in their early-to-mid twenties, distinguishing the brand through intensity of expression in a category where budgets for mass-media saturation were dominated by larger players. This built rapid brand recall but also generated negative publicity, illustrating the trade-off between attention-based differentiation and brand equity risk in a conservative mass-market media environment.

Phase 2 — "It Happens": maturing the masculine idiom

The brand's move to Future Brands as its marketing agency coincided with a deliberate softening of tone. The brand was described at the time as evolving from a "very very naughty" brand toward a more mature, approachable platform, while still retaining its sexual overtones, with commentary noting Wild Stone's use of an Indian thematic and cast in contrast to competitors that leaned on foreign models and settings. This localisation of masculine imagery using Indian protagonists and settings rather than imported Western tropes common among competing deodorant brands is a distinguishing element of Wild Stone's execution noted independently in industry commentary.

Phase 3 — Wild Stone Code: premiumization without abandoning core equity

In 2016, Wild Stone extended into the fine-fragrance/premium hybrid segment with the launch of Wild Stone Code. The Code marketing strategy was handled by Futurebrands, with packaging design by Itu Chaudhuri Design, McNroe's packaging partner since 2010; the sub-brand entered a market segment defined by hybrids combining the value proposition of aerosol deodorants with the pricier positioning of pump-based perfume-style containers, and its France-designed fragrance marked a step back from the brand's earlier "primal aggression" imagery toward the refinement associated with perfume-like products, while the packaging was designed to retain Wild Stone's core equity of a "quiet but intense masculine magnetism." Industry commentary on the packaging redesign further noted a deliberate toning-down of the brand's earlier visual cues of aggression (described as "scratch marks" motifs) while keeping them present at a reduced, more restrained level a literal design expression of the brand's broader shift from overt to understated masculinity.

MCPPL extended the Code sub-brand further in 2022 to include hair styling, beard grooming, and skincare products for men, broadening the platform beyond fragrance into a wider men's grooming range under the same premium positioning.

Celebrity-led brand-ambassador campaigns (2023–2024)

As part of its premium and regional-expansion strategy, MCPPL used Bollywood and Telugu-film celebrity endorsements to carry Wild Stone Code's masculine positioning into new audiences:

• In 2023, the company signed Telugu film actor Vijay Deverakonda as brand ambassador for Wild Stone Code specifically to improve the brand's penetration and demand in South India. The resulting campaign, timed to the 2023 ICC World Test Championship, introduced a range of premium fragrances Pyro, Terra, and Acqua in a film featuring Deverakonda striding through a blazing setting, symbolising inner drive and passionate energy as an expression of "masculine charm."

  
  

• In June 2024, Wild Stone Code launched a new campaign with actor Vicky Kaushal who had earlier been the sub-brand's first celebrity ambassador for its Code Titanium body perfume, with the advertising built around themes of instant freshness and confidence.The campaign was distributed across television, digital, and social media channels.

  
  

The choice of two different film stars for two sub-lines within Code one to unlock a specific regional market (South India via a Telugu star) and one to reinforce the brand's mainstream, pan-India "modern man" positioning (via a Hindi-film star already associated with the sub-brand) indicates a segmented rather than monolithic approach to celebrity endorsement within the broader Wild Stone masculine platform.

Positioning & Consumer Insight

Wild Stone's positioning has consistently centred on constructing a masculine self-image for the user rather than making purely functional (fragrance longevity, freshness) claims although functional cues (freshness, confidence, "instant burst") have become more prominent in recent Code-era communication relative to the brand's earlier, more purely seduction-driven advertising. The independent academic consumer-perception study on the brand identified this as a "target internal mirror" effect: when Wild Stone users were asked how they personally felt when using the product, their responses closely matched the attributes the company had positioned the brand around, indicating that the brand's chosen imagery had been internalised by its own user base as a description of themselves. This is a textbook illustration of aspirational self-congruity in brand positioning: the brand does not merely describe a product benefit, it offers the consumer a mirror of the self-image ("adventurous," "confident," "muscular attraction") that the target consumer wishes to project.

The brand's tagline evolution from the explicit "Wild By Nature" and "Barely Legal," through "It Happens," to the current mass-market slogan "Log Toh Notice Karenge" (loosely, "people will notice") used on Wild Stone's own website traces a consistent throughline: social notice and attraction as the core promised outcome, with the intensity and explicitness of that promise dialled down over time in favour of a more confident, understated articulation of the same masculine-attraction insight.

Media & Channel Strategy

Verified information on Wild Stone's channel strategy is limited to what has been disclosed in trade press and credit-rating documentation. CARE Ratings' credit assessment of MCPPL notes the company incurs its advertisement spend predominantly on the Wild Stone brand, and that the company maintains a distribution network across all Indian states through 712 distributors. Celebrity campaigns in the Code era were distributed across television, digital, and social platforms, and at least one campaign (the Vijay Deverakonda film) was timed to a major cricket property (the 2023 ICC World Test Championship), indicating the use of large live-sport tentpoles for reach in a category where cricket viewership is a proven mass-audience vehicle in India. No verified public information is available on Wild Stone's specific media mix ratios, digital-versus-television spend split, or influencer-marketing budgets.

Business & Brand Outcomes

Documented outcomes are financial and market-share figures reported through credit-rating disclosures, trade press, and business directories, rather than campaign-attributable metrics:

• Wild Stone generated ₹28 crore in revenue in its launch year, and parent company McNROE crossed ₹100 crore in overall revenue by 2009 and over ₹400 crore within roughly a decade of the brand's launch.

  
  

• McNROE's revenue dipped from ₹338.18 crore in the fiscal year ended March 2015 to ₹303.48 crore the following year, a decline that coincided with a slide in market share attributed by trade press to competitive pressure from Fogg's "no-gas" proposition, even after Wild Stone introduced its own no-gas variant in September 2014.

  
  

• The company was targeting revenue of ₹1,200 crore (approximately $167.3 million) by 2022, according to founder Narendra Kumar Daga in a 2019 interview, at a time when the company was ranked among the top three deodorant players nationally by Nielsen with roughly 9% market share.

  
  

• For the financial year ending March 2025, MCPPL's revenue (across the Wild Stone, McNROE, and Secret Temptation brands) was reported in the ₹500–1,000 crore range, with a one-year revenue CAGR of approximately 20% and EBITDA CAGR of approximately 33%, according to business-intelligence platform Tracxn.

  
  

• Wild Stone accounted for approximately 69% of MCPPL's total revenue in FY23, according to CARE Ratings' credit assessment of the company.

  
  

Strategic Implications

Wild Stone's history offers a useful teaching illustration of how a challenger brand in a category dominated by larger multinational and domestic competitors can use a consistent core positioning idea masculine attraction and social notice while adapting its expression of that idea as the brand matures and as the competitive and regulatory environment around advertising tone changes. Three implications stand out for strategy and brand-management teams:

First, positioning durability versus execution flexibility. The underlying insight (a fragrance that makes a man more noticed and more confident) remained stable from 2007 to the present, while the creative register moved from explicit provocation to understated confidence to premium refinement. This suggests that a masculine-attraction positioning can be a durable strategic asset even as its tactical expression must evolve to avoid the reputational costs that explicit advertising incurred for the brand in its earliest phase.

Second, sub-branding as a tool for portfolio and price-tier management. The creation of Wild Stone Code as a distinct, premium-positioned sub-brand with its own packaging partner, fragrance sourcing (French-designed fragrances), and celebrity ambassadors allowed McNROE to pursue premiumization without diluting or repositioning the core Wild Stone mass-market range, illustrating a classic brand-architecture response to the need to serve multiple price tiers under a shared masculine equity.

Third, endorsement strategy tied to specific business objectives rather than generic celebrity fame. The selection of a South Indian film star specifically to address a documented regional penetration gap (versus a Hindi-film star for the mainstream Code Titanium line) reflects a segmented, objective-linked approach to celebrity marketing rather than a single national-face strategy a useful contrast for students against brands that rely on one ambassador across all markets and sub-lines.

At the same time, the verified record also illustrates risk: the FY15–FY16 revenue decline coinciding with Fogg's category disruption shows that positioning strength alone does not insulate a brand from product-format innovation by competitors, and that McNROE's own response (a no-gas variant launched three years after Fogg's) arrived too late to fully defend market share in that instance, according to trade press analysis at the time.

Discussion Questions

1. Wild Stone moved from an explicit, controversy-generating "Wild By Nature" positioning to a more understated "It Happens" and later "Log Toh Notice Karenge" platform. Using the concept of brand equity risk versus reach, evaluate whether this evolution represents a strengthening or a dilution of the brand's original masculine positioning.

   
   

2. McNROE created Wild Stone Code as a distinct premium sub-brand rather than repositioning the core Wild Stone range upward. What brand-architecture principles does this decision reflect, and what risks would the company have faced had it instead tried to premiumize the flagship Wild Stone brand directly?

   
   

3. McNROE signed Vijay Deverakonda specifically to address a stated South India penetration gap, while retaining Vicky Kaushal for its mainstream Code Titanium line. Assess the strategic logic of using different celebrity endorsers for different sub-lines of the same brand platform, versus a single national brand ambassador strategy.

   
   

4. The documented FY15–FY16 revenue decline coincided with the rise of Fogg's "no-gas" proposition, and McNROE's own no-gas variant arrived three years after Fogg's. What does this sequence suggest about the limits of positioning-led differentiation when a competitor introduces a genuine product-format innovation?

   
   

5. The academic consumer-perception study cited in this case found that Wild Stone users described themselves using the same attributes (young, confident, muscular attraction) that the brand's advertising used to describe its target user. Using the concept of self-congruity theory, discuss what this finding implies about how deeply a masculine-identity positioning can become internalised by a brand's user base, and what risks this creates if the brand later needs to reposition.