Walking a tightrope to manage price-value equation

Premiumisation has helped HUL's home care division to tide over the urban slowdown in recent quarters.

- Viveat Susan Pinto

Krishnandan Sundaram, executive director of home care at Hindustan Unilever's (HUL's) largest division, which contributes 37% to its overall revenue, talks about premiumisation, inflation concerns, local competition and retail innovations in an interview with Viveat Susan Pinto. Excerpts:

What are you doing to maintain sales momentum in the future?

We are over-indexed on premium. This is something we have consciously built over the years within home care and we intend to stay the course. If you look at fabric cleaning, we have invested in premium formats such as fabric conditioners; identified premium trends such as the shift to liquid detergents early on in the life cycle of the category. While the strategy is to continue providing higher-order benefits at the premium end, we are also taking some of these learnings into the mass market.

What are you precisely doing in the mass market? Is this helping you to tackle competition from small and local brands?