How are brands tackling period poverty and menstrual hygiene in India?

Move to 2020 and an Indian brand, Rio Pads, broke the blue blood barrier by showing the color red in a TVC starring actress Radhika Apte. Other brands have since followed suit in the move from blue to red.

“The move by advertising and advertisers to acknowledge that menstrual blood is red and not blue is a small step for a campaign but a giant leap for womankind,” says Pallavi Chakravarti, creative head of DDB Mudra West.

Advertising has come a long way since then. The conversations have gotten more real and less hush-hush, but there’s still a long road to be traveled. Kartik Johari, vice-president of Nobel Hygiene (makers of Rio pads), says: “Ads must work toward showing periods as they are – largely painful and agonizing, and different for every woman.” The temptation to fall back on tropes that gloss on girl power with dancing and singing actors must be resisted, he says. Periods can be tough and that ought to be represented honestly by advertising.

Finding the right culture codes

Culturally in India, periods have been couched in secrecy and kept out of open conversations. Manisha Kapoor, secretary-general of ASCI (The Advertising Standards Council of India), says: “Terms such as ‘impure’ are often associated with periods and period blood, and there are several restrictions on women from engaging in activities that are considered auspicious or pure, such as worshipping or cooking food.”

P&G’s Whisper, India’s leading sanitary napkin brand, created a platform for women to question, debate and challenge many menstrual taboos when it launched the much-awarded ‘Touch the Pickle’ campaign in 2014-15. The campaign was conceptualized by BBDO India and won the Glass Lion Grand Prix at Cannes Lions. Sharing the backdrop of the creative idea, Josy Paul, chairman of BBDO India, says: “In India, there are myths surrounding menstruation, including one that ‘a menstruating woman should refrain from touching a pickle jar as the pickle could get spoilt.’ The myth is that a woman on her period is impure and anything she touches becomes impure.”

What worked was that the idea embraced socio-cultural tension points and found creative ways to resolve the issue. Paul adds: “Not only did 2.9 million women pledge to ‘touch the pickle jar,’ but the work resulted in sparking a huge conversation in India around the issue.” It started a dialogue in India that ranged from a TedX Bangalore talk to stand up-acts and endorsement by leading Bollywood actresses and celebrities, as well as comic books on the subject.

Time for advertising to help reframe the period story

Advertising creates aspirational images and can be a great ally in bringing about a progressive change. Kapoor says: “By normalizing the desired behavior (rather than unintentionally reinforce existing shame and taboos), advertising can create an impetus for change.” Advertising also could be more progressive and depict the women as not ‘alone’ in this task or having to ‘fight’ society, but to have those around her also accept periods and conversations around it as something that is normal, she adds.

The recently launched GenderNext study by ASCI suggests a framework for making more progressive ads through the depiction of women in ways where they hold themselves in esteem, feel empowered in their choices and receive the support they need from those around them. All these points are extremely relevant for the sanitary protection category so that it can move out from the shadow of shame and taboos, and show periods and products as more normal.

While for a long time period conversation has been women’s domain, it is time to bring men in the fold as a step toward normalization. Chakravarti says: “In a country – and society – where patriarchy is deep-seated, normalization is impossible until the men meet us halfway. Fathers, brothers, husbands, friends – when will they stop looking the other way and pretend that menstruation doesn’t exist, or worse still, is something to hide and be embarrassed about?”

As part of the team that works on Stayfree, Chakravarti is glad that bringing men into the fold has been at the forefront of the brand’s agenda for more than a couple of years now. Most recently Stayfree launched its Daughter’s Day campaign, which urges fathers to be involved in period conversations with their daughters.

Boondh, along with ‘Schbang For Good,’ launched #UngenderMenstruation – India’s first movement to make menstruation gender-inclusive. The idea, says Jain, is to say that “menstruation is a challenging experience for all menstruators, and it is not limited to cisgender women – transmasculine individuals and non-binary individuals menstruate too.” The campaign wanted to reiterate the fact that not all menstruators are women and not all women menstruate.

The period conversation beyond advertising

An interesting shift has been around period talk no longer being seen as advertising’s job alone. Films and OTT content are also stepping in and doing their bit in moving the needle.

Padman, a 2018 Hindi-language feature film made by ad man R Balki, was one of the first to have sanitary pads at the center of the story. The film was inspired by the life of social activist Arunachalam Muruganantham, who is known to have done seminal work in revolutionizing the concept of menstrual hygiene in rural India by creating a low-cost sanitary napkin machine.

Lauding the shift, Chakravarti says: “From a time when it was near impossible to watch a commercial about sanitary napkins with the family, we’ve reached a point where a biopic of a man who distributed sanitary napkins is given a theatrical release.” And that, in her opinion, is something that the country needs right now – “to accept menstruation as real and right and healthy and natural.”

Various brands are now doing their bit to fill this information gap through ‘did you know’ sessions and free live sessions with doctors. OTT platforms too have messages on period poverty and access going out loud and clear.

Boondh, an Indian social enterprise working on sustainable menstrual products and menstrual literacy, is behind a unique non-profit initiative in menstrual art called ‘The Crimson Wave’ (TCW) – possibly India’s first traveling menstrual art exhibition. Launched in 2017, TCW has traveled to Chennai, Bangalore, Goa and Delhi so far, and went online for its 2020 edition. The central idea of the project is, adds Jain, “to curate artwork about periods, myths about menstruation and different representations of female biology from a diverse range of artists across the world.” Not for the faint-hearted, The Crimson Wave has gone even further and launched a sub-project Erythrean, which features artworks created through the medium of menstrual blood.

Making menstrual stories inclusive and beyond urban-centric

In a country like India, the penetration of sanitary pads has largely been an urban phenomenon to a large extent – with the rural population still largely outside the fold due to various social, cultural and economic reasons. Johari says: “It is critical to push menstrual hygiene up in the hierarchy of needs, to empower women to buy pads at whatever price point because it’s their fundamental right.”

While this progress is worth celebrating, what’s missing, according to Varsha Rohani, group impact manager, Schbang for Good, in a lot of these conversations are the intersectional nuances of representation and the multiplicity of lived experiences by different menstruators. Advertising for menstrual products and hygiene still cater to urban audiences, working women and cisgendered women, who are already a part of these conversations and often leading these dialogues, she adds.

The smiling, dancing women who feature on most period ads and packaging are invalidating the experiences of those living with conditions such as endometriosis or PCOS that cause extreme pain. Rohani says: “Brands need to lead the change by fostering a community that makes menstruators feel seen and heard.” And in the process help mainstream the marginalized.

It’s not a change that will come about overnight, but brands from Stayfree to Whisper to Rio are doing their bit to change the narrative. And the ones that are succeeding are those that are finding the solutions from within the social and cultural dilemmas of the women. To witness a cultural and societal evolution in this space, the roadmap would need to dispel myths, break the silence and normalize the subject.