Aishwarya Rai

The wedding of Aishwarya Rai to Abhishek Bachchan has served as a major publicity boon for some products.

At a time when Indian consumers increasingly look to global brands for lifestyle enhancement products, cosmetics giant L’Oreal Paris could not have asked for a better publicity boon than the wedding of its brand ambassador Ash to Abhishek.

Ash, a former Miss World and reigning Bollywood heartthrob, married into one of India’s biggest brands – the Bachchans – and has been hogging the limelight across the print and visual media for the past few weeks in a free publicity ride that most brands can only dream of.

In 1994, Sushmita Sen and Ash’s dual achievements of winning the Miss Universe and Miss World titles led to the emergence of young beauty-conscious Indians with ready money to splurge on cosmetics, which paved the way for players like L’Oreal, Chanel and Estee Lauder to foray into the lucrative Indian market.

Within a short span of the last five-six years, the use of cosmetics by Indians increased significantly with more women and men taking greater interest in personal grooming. With the demand for cosmetics on the rise, many of the world’s popular cosmetics brands have already entered the Indian market and some more have set their sights on the country.

The domestic market has been studied well by MNCs for over a decade now before they came up with their launches. One such company is L’Oreal.

Having arrived in 1990s, L’Oreal is reaping the first- mover benefits and recorded a jump of over 40 per cent in its India sales last year.