Menstrual hygiene and brands
From taboos to bringing cultural change, Whisper India wants girls to continue their schooling even after puberty but can it be done
Two things before I share my thoughts:
1. I should define menstrual hygiene - it is about ensuring women and girls live in an environment that values and supports their ability to manage their menstruation with dignity.
2. We men will never understand what menstruation is and what are the issues (physical and emotional). So if I fail somewhere in this post then my sincere apologies. The Indian man(almost everyone) is still evolving and we are proudly advising - “A menstruating woman who cooks food for her husband will certainly be reborn as a kutri’ (bitch).”
The realisation that menstruation or periods isn’t a laughing stock came quite late in my life. I am scared of blood. School and parents never encouraged any discussion on such topics. It was a well-kept secret but now when I look back there were so many silent signs. When you are growing up, in the society ground you are just kids playing a simple game. But after some years you realise that you are no more kids; there's a boy gang and girl gang. Both now maintain distance.
Amma sometimes would avoid a puja function and when asked she would tell me that you are too small to understand. Today when I debate, I am told not to buy or read books.
I have memories of my cousin sister dressed up as a goddess for a function. I was happy that I was meeting my 7 cousins and it was a lot of fun. I was told that my cousin sister is now a big girl, I didn’t pay any heed, after all, I am a guy why should I care about painful cramps.
The girl who gets her periods is a matter of celebration is pushed away for a week from the kitchen or visiting temples because she is impure. In a research paper, Janet Chawla writes,
“According to historian N.N.Bhattacharyya, different areas of India have had notions of the menstruating goddess. In Punjab, it was believed that Mother Earth (‘Dharti Ma’) ‘slept’ for a week each month. Still today in the Kamakhya temple of Assam and in parts of Orissa the rituals of the menstruation of the goddess are celebrated during the monsoon season.”
Menstruation has been looked as a taboo for ages and across societies and religions. Even in Judeo-Christian history, the menstrual taboo has been an important reason for excluding women from the position of authority, demonstrates Elizabeth M. Whelan.
Menstruation also continues to be a subject of gender disparity in India. Myths about menstruation are largely prevalent, forcing many girls to drop out of school early or be ostracised for the duration of their menstrual cycle every month. A 2014 report by the NGO Dasra titled Spot On! found that nearly 23 million girls drop out of school annually due to lack of proper menstrual hygiene management facilities, which include the availability of sanitary napkins and logical awareness of menstruation.
A 2015 survey by the Ministry of Education found that in 63% schools in villages, teachers never discussed menstruation and how to deal with it in a hygienic manner. Indian Council for Medical Research’s 2011-12 report stated that only 38 percent menstruating girls in India spoke to their mothers about menstruation.
Keep Girls in School
Thankfully my cousin sister completed her education but what about others who drop out due to periods. According to Whisper, the P&G-owned brand states that 1 in 5 girls are dropping out of school each year and we don’t even notice. To bridge this gap, Whisper reinforces its pledge to double the impact of their existing menstrual hygiene education program by reaching 5 crore girls by 2022. As a part of the campaign, it has launched a new film ‘Keep Girls in School’ that aims to create awareness on how even today, girls across India drop out of school on hitting puberty.
In 2014 Whisper made a lot of buzz with #TouchThePickle - a campaign designed to bust period taboos. The brand’s insight was based on a wired but a relevant taboo - girls on periods should not touch pickle jars as that will contaminate the pickle.
These were the days of integrated campaigns. The brand created a Facebook app-driven engagement on social media. Fans were asked to share their own stories of having broken period taboos, take a pledge, invite friends, dislike taboos, watch the videos and share status messages with cool emoticons.
ToucheThePickle went on to become a stellar campaign that the brand still talks about and the agency BBDO won a bag full of awards including the Grand Prix in the Glass Lions at the Cannes Lions 2015, for having the “power to affect true cultural change.”
In 2016 the brand introduced #OwnThose5Days to take the core messaging of bringing cultural change forward. Apparently, the myth is that menstruating girls/women should take rest during those five days of the month since they cannot perform to their full potential. To break this myth the brand collaborated with real-life women achievers, who share stories of themselves having been up and lively even during their periods.
The campaign brought together faces like badminton champion, Ashwini Ponnappa; youngest Indian female pilot, Ayesha Aziz; and youngest female chef, Anahita Dhondy in its ad film.
The selfie-driven stories and blogger outreach might make for a buzzy campaign on digital but ‘own those 5 days’ is just another women-empowerment themed campaign featuring real women achievers.
With the new campaign, Whisper is hitting the right button by shifting from taboos to finally drilling on the bigger issues. Research has shown that the mother is the first point of contact for a girl when she encounters this physical change.
However, Indian Council for Medical Research’s 2011-12 report stated that only 38 percent menstruating girls in India spoke to their mothers about menstruation. Many mothers were themselves unaware what menstruation was, how it was to be explained to a teenager and what practices could be considered as menstrual hygiene management.
Schools were not very helpful either as schools in rural areas refrained from discussing menstrual hygiene. A 2015 survey by the Ministry of Education found that in 63% of schools in villages, teachers never discussed menstruation and how to deal with it in a hygienic manner.
Last year during the brand decided to address this problem by educating 5 crore girls about menstruation by 2022. As a part of this pledge, Whisper will now be reaching out to more than 40,000 schools to increase awareness about menstrual hygiene. The brand claims to have already educated over 2.5 crore girls about menstrual hygiene since its inception in 1995.
Whisper’s latest campaign has brought the brand back in track asking the potent questions and making the cultural change. But the online portal of spreading education lacks clarity. Rewardme definitely was exciting when it started but over the months the content portal has lost focus, quality and frequency. Besides whoever built the strategy for the portal clearly has no understanding of content and publishing platforms.
A common problem with the majority of brands who will get high talking about content marketing in events or industry bodies but lack a long term vision, patience and investments.
(More on this with an interesting perspective on LinkedIn)
The business of menstrual hygiene and potent issues
A 2017 report by Euromonitor, a market research company, revealed that the Indian feminine hygiene product market was valued at $340 million and is expected to reach $522 million in 2020. Women have an estimated 450 periods (2,250 days) during their lifetime. Though the quantity of pads and other products used by each individual changes from person to person, a woman spends anything from Rs 8000 to Rs 30,000 and above, on an average in her life on period products.
According to industry reports: the market is valued at INR 25.02 billion in 2018 and is expected to reach INR 58.62 billion by 2024.
In 2018 Whisper, held the largest market share (51.42%), followed by Stayfree and Kotex. Along with a powerful communication strategy, the brand has launched lower-priced variants of intimate hygiene products, making them affordable for women belonging to the different social strata of the country.
Cost is a factor - 70% of women in India say their family can’t afford to buy them. The Indian government after backtracking on GST has introduced schemes to reduce the affordability factor but irregular and inadequate supply is another potent problem. (Hundreds of Kenyan women are sharing horror stories of their experiences with Procter & Gamble’s flagship menstrual pads, Always, under the hashtag #myalwaysexperience.)
“We prefer to use the store-bought pads. We give these to our mothers,” said one of the girls who participated in the TNUSSP study. Subsidised napkins were not of a good quality and were good only for a couple of hours, said local anganwadi workers who play a crucial role in helping adolescent girls understand menstruation.
Whisper’s biggest competitor Stayfree has products addressing the affordability factor but on its communication, it is focusing on the behavioural change. In 2018 the brand roped in Indian badminton player PV Sindhu for its “Dream of Progress” campaign. The campaign encouraged and urged girls to pursue their dreams of progress and inspired them to not hold back even during days of periods.
The brand has so far continued with PV Sindhu and its positioning of not being bogged down by periods.
Menstrual hygiene debate is incomplete if we don't speak about the disposal of soiled pads. The polymeric sanitary napkins, which have replaced cloth napkins to a great extent, are made of a material that is non-biodegradable, leading to the accumulation of used napkins in landfills.
Only 2,000 soiled napkins and blood-soaked cotton are disposed of after segregation into biodegradable and non-biodegradable components (Municipal Solid Waste (Management and Handling) Rules).
Swati Badekar hailing from Vadodara is credited with installing sanitary vending machines in several schools of Mirzapur, Noida and Agra. These machines dispense organic napkins made from biodegradable raw materials. The Garima Abhiyan, a district-wide campaign run by the administration of Simdega district, Jharkhand, is breaking the taboo associated with menstruation by providing its women with eco-friendly sanitary pads.
Menstrual hygiene - a long way to go
From addressing taboos to addressing the real potent issues of menstruation in India, Whisper is doing its bit while capturing the biggest market in share. However, menstrual hygiene management in India has a long way to go. The belief in humanity is instantly killed when one consumes news like - girls told to undress after a used sanitary napkin was found in a garden outside Sahjanand Girls Institute, where they are banned from the hostel when they are having their periods.
At the same time, we also have news where a team of 60 students from various departments of NIT-Jamshedpur recently started a campaign “Let's Talk, Period” to make underprivileged girls aware about their health being a priority.
“We engineering students have a lot of academic pressure 365 days a year. Also, speaking on menstrual hygiene is not an easy thing. We have to break social taboos along the way. But all of us feel it is necessary,” said Onkar Kumar, a fourth-year mechanical engineering student.
Can we finally bring the macho Indian male into the menstruation hygiene discussion? Can Whisper bell the cat if it is really interested in bringing the real cultural change? I want to see the father buying a packet of sanitary napkin for his daughter.
Is it too much to ask in 2020?