Five places where a personal-care marketer's judgement is tested

In Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines a large share of our customers buy personal care for the day, at a price set by a coin. A Helaimas sachet sells for Rp1,000 in Indonesia, and the shopkeeper hangs it in strips beside the door. Because the coin price cannot move easily, the industry's usual response to rising costs is to put less product in the pack, which raises the price per millilitre for the people least able to buy in bulk. I manage our ladder from sachet to family bottle as one structure. Since 2022 we have reported the sachet premium, the price per millilitre of the smallest pack against the family bottle, for every brand and market, and we cap it at 30 per cent. Some premium is justified by the cost of laminate, filling and distribution. Beyond that it is margin taken from shoppers with the least room to absorb it, and I would rather recover cost through visible prices on larger packs, simpler ranges and cheaper materials.

Online sales are 22 per cent of our revenue, and about two-fifths of that comes from live selling on the two largest marketplaces in Indonesia and a short-video app used across the region. A host can talk for three hours, answer hundreds of questions and close sales in real time, which makes live selling our most effective and least supervised form of advertising. I treat every session as an advertisement. Hosts work from a claims card of approved and prohibited statements, contracted creators state the paid relationship in the first minute and on screen, and a compliance reviewer watches a sample of sessions as they are broadcast. The Singapore Code of Advertising Practice, administered by the Advertising Standards Authority of Singapore, expects a paid relationship to be clear to the audience, and codes in our other markets have moved the same way. I judge live selling on returns and claim-related complaints as well as revenue, because a session that sells well and returns badly has only moved its cost.

Halal certification is central to our business and is not mine to grant. Our plants in Nilai and Pasuruan hold certification from the recognised bodies in Malaysia and Indonesia, and our head of halal assurance and the regulatory team own the evidence behind it. My responsibility is how we speak about it. We state that a product is certified halal and show the recognised mark; we do not imply that certification makes a product gentler, purer or better for skin, and we never use it in place of an ingredient claim that needs its own evidence. Cosmetic claims in ASEAN markets must be substantiated and must not stray into medicinal territory, so every Embunsari claim has a substantiation file reviewed before launch. In 2020 I also retired the whitening language Embunsari had used for twenty years. We now describe even tone and protection from sun damage, claims we can support and which do not tell shoppers that their natural complexion is a problem.

Sachets are the most criticised pack in Southeast Asian personal care, and the criticism is fair: they are light, layered and rarely collected. In 2023 we moved Helaimas sachets to a single-polymer laminate that recyclers can process, at a cost of S$4.3 million in tooling and line changes. I declined to advertise them as recyclable, because in most districts where they are sold nobody collects flexible packaging. Our environmental claims now describe something measured that has already happened: tonnes collected, grams of plastic removed from a pack, the share of our packaging by weight made from one polymer. We pay waste banks in Surabaya and Sidoarjo to collect flexible packaging of every brand, and report the tonnage, its destination and the cost to the board's Sustainability Committee. Authorities in the region are watching green claims more closely, but my reason is simpler. A claim that depends on infrastructure the shopper does not have is a claim about someone else's city.

Embunsari is sold in Bahasa Indonesia, Malay, Filipino, English and, since 2025, Vietnamese. Indonesian and Malay look close enough for head offices to treat them as one language, and they are not: percuma means free of charge in Malaysia and pointless in Indonesia, and a promotion written for one market can embarrass the brand in the other. Since 2021 our creative work has been written first in Bahasa Indonesia, where nearly half of Embunsari's sales are made, by a Jakarta agency. Malay copy is written, not converted, by writers in Kuala Lumpur, and English is an adaptation for Singapore rather than the source. The brand's central brief defines the idea, the evidence and the forbidden claims; each line belongs to its own language. I learnt the limit of this approach in the Philippines, where an idea built on Indonesian wordplay failed for a year. We now develop every new idea in two languages at once before approving it.