This report first appeared in Gulf Marketing Review's November 2008 issue. The full report with statistics is available for download at the bottom of this page.

The household products industry is stable, mature and saturated. Multinational companies control the majority of the market share, while local producers fight for an insignificant piece of the market share.

Evident from the media coverage, household products are heavily reliant on advertisement and in particular TVC’s. PR activities are little to non-existent, with the exception of Crest, Comfort, Lux, Dove and JIF who had primarily 1 PR clipping each for the month. None of the other household products seem to engage in any PR activity for the timeframe monitored (Dec. 15, 2007 – Jan. 15, 2008).

The majority of the media findings fall under ‘Business’ and ‘Lifestyle & General Interest’ magazines with little coming from newspapers. Despite Lux’s minuscule coverage, it stood out, as there seems to be some sort of an engagement in PR activities and thus the mere 2 articles covered in the month were resultant from their PR activities.

One of the media coverage findings, highlight the facts that Vanish, Febreze, Cheer, Tide and Dryel had no media coverage at all, while Camay only had a single print advertisement, Downy and Omo were only covered via a weekly price listing review. Lux was the only brand that had a PR activity coverage in the month. Lux’s coverage was on its hosting of an Awards night.

All coverage was manifest, as the nature of the sector dictates. There were no negative reputation drivers and the majority of the coverage contained messages without any reputation drivers. The entire coverage came out of UAE publications, while Saudi dailies did not produce any coverage for any of the household brands.

Approximately 45% did not recognize any of the household brands in print media in both the UAE and Saudi markets. Despite Comfort’s lack of PR activity, it was the overall highest recognized brand. Febreze and Cheer were barely recognized at all in both the UAE and Saudi markets.

Nationality groups seemed to play a role in brand recognition and in particular for Westerners. Westerners in Saudi Arabia had high recognition of Vanish, while Westerners in the UAE barely recognized any of the brands.

In both the UAE and Saudi markets, gender played a role in terms of brand recognition. While males recognized Comfort, Omo and Tide, females recognized Comfort Downy and Vanish in the Saudi market. Males recognized Tide, Comfort and Omo, while females recognized Comfort, Downy and Vanish in the UAE market.

Age played a role in terms of brand recognition in both the UAE and Saudi markets. In the Saudi market, the higher the age, the higher the recognition is for Omo and Comfort, while in the UAE market, the higher the age, the higher the recognition is for Vanish, Omo and Comfort.

We asked Zed Ayesh, Managing Director of Fortune Business Development Consultancy to give us an insight into the sector and private labels. He said, “Multinational companies enjoy better supply chain management and economies of scale. For many reasons, supply chains favor big retailers, as they offer the combination of convenience, quality, service and competitive prices over the smaller retailers, which may save the consumer a few pennies.” he added, “Most of the new brands or local brands lack marketing capabilities because retailers demand obscene amounts of money from suppliers. There are more than 12 different fees suppliers have to pay the retailer for shelf space and visibility”. He added that private labels do not engage in any marketing activities. “Detergents, for example are insignificant purchases. They cost very little, with less frequent purchases that other fast moving consumer goods. Consumers do not typically go out of their way or spend much effort on such purchases”, he said.

When asked why we are only seeing communication through TVC’s, he explains that TV is the best tool for mass marketing. Women are the most likely targeted audience for this product, and as a result, it singles out TV as the most effective medium.

Perhaps, it would be wise for the household products to step up their PR activities in order to raise greater awareness of their products as advertisements alone do not do justice in distinguishing and differentiating one product from the next, what the brand stands for, and so forth. They should also increase their advertisements in printed media to open up an untouched segment; the single males.