Wild Stone’s Insight into Everyday Fragrance Usage Among Men

Industry & Competitive Context

India's deodorant and personal fragrance category expanded rapidly through the 2000s and 2010s, driven by rising disposable incomes, urbanisation, and growing personal-grooming spend among young men. By the mid-2010s the category had become intensely competitive, with Vini Cosmetics' Fogg holding category leadership on a "no-gas," functionality-led proposition, alongside ITC's Engage, Hindustan Unilever's Axe, and Wild Stone, marketed by Kolkata-headquartered McNROE Consumer Products Private Limited (MCPPL).

According to Nielsen data cited in a 2018 Forbes India profile of the company, Fogg led the market with a 16 percent volume share, while McNROE's two deodorant brands, Wild Stone (male) and Secret Temptation (female), together held a 9.9 percent share in the first quarter of that year, placing the company in second position ahead of ITC's Engage (9.5 percent) and Nivea (7.9 percent). A CARE Ratings press release on MCPPL further confirms that Secret Temptation contributed around 13 percent of the company's total sales, with the balance driven predominantly by Wild Stone and the company's talcum powder and grooming lines.

MCPPL itself was founded in 1986 by Narendra Kumar Daga in Bhadrak, Odisha, initially as a talcum powder business under the brand Heaven's Garden. The company entered the deodorant category in 2006 with the women's brand Secret Temptation, which generated revenue of ₹9 crore in its first year, according to Forbes India. Wild Stone followed in 2007 and generated ₹28 crore in its first year of operation. MCPPL crossed ₹100 crore in annual revenue in 2009, and by the mid-2010s had grown into what marketing consultant Jagdeep Kapoor, quoted in the same Forbes India article, described as a company with the potential to become a ₹1,000-crore business.

Brand Situation Prior to the Campaign

Wild Stone's growth trajectory was not linear. Forbes India reported that MCPPL's revenue actually declined for the first time in a decade, falling from ₹338.18 crore in the fiscal year ended March 2015 to ₹303.48 crore in the following year. This revenue dip coincided with an erosion in category market share: MCPPL's volume share slipped from a high of 7.8 percent in the second quarter of 2015 to 7 percent in the first quarter of 2016, at which point it was tied for fourth position with Park Avenue, while the top three players Fogg, Engage, and Axe — together controlled roughly a third of the market.

The article attributes this competitive pressure primarily to Fogg's "no-gas" positioning, which had reframed deodorant purchase decisions around functional value (more usable sprays per can) rather than purely aspirational appeal. MCPPL had launched its own no-gas variant of Wild Stone in September 2014, three years after Fogg, but this had not meaningfully reversed the share decline, in part because Fogg had already established strong top-of-mind recall for the no-gas format.

It was against this backdrop that Ankit Daga, son of founder Narendra Kumar Daga, formally joined the family business in 2016 and was tasked with reversing the slide and setting a new growth direction for the company's deodorant portfolio.

Strategic Objective

Based on the consumer insight work described by Ankit Daga to Forbes India, the strategic objective was twofold: first, to reposition the brand's value proposition in a market Daga described as polarised between consumers unwilling to spend more than ₹250 on a fragrance product and a smaller segment willing to spend significantly more on imported perfumes; and second, to rebuild category relevance without competing head-on against the entrenched leader on its own functional turf.

Rather than repositioning the flagship Wild Stone brand directly against Fogg, MCPPL chose to create a distinct sub-brand with sharper positioning, insulating the launch from a direct price-and-perception battle with the category leader. Internally, the company also narrowed its operational focus: soap and talcum powder production were placed on hold so that organisational resources could be concentrated on the deodorant and perfume business, per Ankit Daga's account in the same Forbes India interview.

Campaign Architecture & Execution

The centrepiece of this repositioning was Wild Stone Code, a perfumed "no-gas" deodorant launched in 2016. Two decisions distinguished Code's go-to-market execution, both confirmed directly by Ankit Daga. The first was packaging: Code broke from MCPPL's traditional black packaging in favour of white packs, a shift Daga noted was met with internal resistance before he secured his father's approval. The second was marketing investment: the company sanctioned ₹4 crore to aggressively advertise the new product. Forbes India reports that within two years of launch, Wild Stone Code had grown into a ₹50-crore brand.

Alongside the sub-brand launch, MCPPL restructured its communication strategy for the core Wild Stone franchise. Forbes India notes that the category's dominant creative template a man sprays deodorant, women take notice was one Wild Stone had itself used in earlier, more provocative advertising. In response to Fogg's functionality-led "Kya Chal Raha Hai" campaigns changing the competitive narrative, MCPPL introduced the "Kunal" campaign in early 2017, built around the tagline "Log Toh Notice Karenge" ("People are bound to notice").

The campaign's creative premise, as documented across multiple published accounts of the advertisement, features a house party at which an older host compliments a young guest, Kunal, on his fragrance, only to recognise the same scent on his own daughter the next morning prompting an exasperated shout of the character's name. Ankit Daga told Forbes India that the campaign "became massively popular and changed the perception of the brand," and the company followed the original film with sequel instalments sustaining the Kunal character across subsequent bursts of advertising. Independent advertising commentary has additionally noted that the Kunal campaign was widely viewed on YouTube within weeks of release and was distinguished from international rivals such as Axe which typically depicted a man attracting a crowd of women by instead building tension around a single, specific relationship.

By December 2018, trade press reporting (aggregated via public company-profile records) indicates that MCPPL launched seven additional men's grooming products under an approximately ₹20-crore marketing commitment, and that new products in the Wild Stone Edge series moved away from the Kunal protagonist used in the brand's earlier commercials indicating a deliberate evolution of the campaign architecture as the brand's product portfolio broadened.

Positioning & Consumer Insight

The consumer insight underpinning this campaign architecture, as articulated directly by Ankit Daga, was that the Indian fragrance market was split between highly price-sensitive buyers and a smaller, higher-spending segment purchasing imported perfumes, with limited differentiated offerings in between. Wild Stone Code was designed to occupy this gap by combining a "no-gas," longer-lasting perfume format with a price point and packaging language distinct from both extremes.

At the level of brand meaning, Wild Stone's communication consistently anchored fragrance to social validation and everyday interpersonal impression rather than to hygiene or functional freshness claims alone a positioning direction distinct from Fogg's product-utility narrative. The Kunal campaign operationalised this by depicting fragrance as something that leaves a lasting, specific impression on another person in an ordinary social setting (a house party, a family interaction), rather than staging exaggerated crowd-attraction scenarios. This is consistent with the broader category observation, noted in trade commentary on gender representation in deodorant advertising, that Wild Stone's communication has revolved around the idea of fragrance functioning as a marker of individual charisma and memorability in daily social contexts, addressing men as an audience for whom being "noticed" carries currency in routine, everyday situations rather than only in exceptional ones.

Media & Channel Strategy

Public information on Wild Stone's channel mix is limited. What is documented is that the "Kunal" films were produced and distributed as television commercials that also achieved significant organic reach on YouTube, and that the company allocated a specific, disclosed budget (₹4 crore) to advertise the Wild Stone Code launch and a separate disclosed budget (₹20 crore) toward marketing its 2018 men's grooming product expansion. No verified public information is available on the precise media mix (television versus digital spend ratios), regional media weighting, influencer partnerships, or paid digital amplification strategy used for the Kunal campaign specifically.

Business & Brand Outcomes

The documented business outcomes are as follows. Wild Stone Code reached ₹50 crore in brand revenue within two years of its 2016 launch. At the consolidated company level, MCPPL's operating income grew from ₹387.73 crore in FY22 to ₹495.27 crore in FY23, a 28 percent increase, according to CARE Ratings, with the increase attributed to rising demand for the company's deodorant, perfume, and talcum powder products. The same report notes that MCPPL's PBILDT margin improved from 2.06 percent in FY22 to 3.34 percent in FY23, which CARE Ratings attributed to better absorption of fixed overheads as operating scale increased. Separate company-registry data indicates MCPPL's operating revenue crossed into the ₹500–1,000 crore range for the fiscal year ending March 2025.

On market position, Nielsen data cited by the founder in a 2019 interview with FashionNetwork India shows MCPPL (Wild Stone and Secret Temptation combined) closing 2018 with a 9.3 percent volume market share as India's second-largest deodorant manufacturer, improving further to 9 percent in the first quarter of 2019 — indicating that share had stabilised and modestly recovered from the 7 percent trough recorded in early 2016. No verified public information is available on Wild Stone-specific (as distinct from consolidated MCPPL) revenue figures for years after FY18, nor on campaign-specific metrics such as recall scores, sales lift directly attributable to the Kunal campaign, or digital engagement statistics beyond the general observation that the films achieved wide YouTube viewership.

Strategic Implications

Wild Stone's experience illustrates a recurring dynamic in FMCG categories facing a well-resourced, functionally positioned challenger: rather than contesting the leader's chosen battleground of price-per-use utility, MCPPL used a distinct sub-brand (Code) to reposition around an underserved price-and-experience segment, limiting the risk of diluting or directly undercutting its core Wild Stone franchise. The willingness to depart from established visual equity moving from black to white packaging despite internal resistance reflects a broader lesson that brand-identity conventions should be tested against consumer segmentation insight rather than preserved by default once a category leader has shifted the terms of competition.

At the communications level, the sustained, serialised use of a single recurring character (Kunal) across multiple campaign bursts, rather than one-off executions, appears to have functioned as a mechanism for building continuity of brand association over several years, a pattern consistent with the documented decision to retire the character only when the company deliberately widened its portfolio strategy with the Edge series in 2018. This suggests that campaign architecture built around a durable narrative device can extend a positioning's shelf life well beyond a single burst, provided the underlying insight continues to hold.

Finally, the financial trajectory disclosed by CARE Ratings margin expansion alongside revenue growth indicates that MCPPL's positioning and product-mix decisions coincided with, though cannot from public data alone be proven to have directly caused, improved operating efficiency at scale. This is an important caveat for interpreting the case: publicly available information supports a strong correlation between the strategic pivot of 2016 onward and the company's subsequent recovery in both market share and financial performance, but no independently audited, campaign-attributed causal analysis has been published.

Discussion Questions

Under what conditions is launching a distinct sub-brand (as MCPPL did with Wild Stone Code) preferable to repositioning the existing flagship brand directly against a category leader's new value proposition?

Wild Stone's shift from black to white packaging for Code faced internal resistance before approval. What organisational mechanisms can companies use to balance long-held brand equity against emerging consumer insight?

How does sustaining a single recurring character (Kunal) across multiple campaign bursts affect brand recall and positioning durability compared to a strategy of frequent creative refresh?

MCPPL's margin improvement from FY22 to FY23 coincided with, but is not proven to be caused by, its brand repositioning. What additional data would an MBA analyst need to establish a causal link between marketing strategy and financial performance in this case?

Given the category split Ankit Daga identified between sub-₹250 spenders and premium imported-perfume buyers what risks does a "no-gas" perfumed deodorant like Code face as competitors attempt to replicate this middle-market positioning?