The Fate of P& G's New Shampoo Product “Ascend” in China At the end of the 1990s, the shampoo market was booming in China. With the flourishing Chinese brands, P&G was confronted with a tough time in company development internationally. In the shampoo market, P&G was challenged by C- Bons and Unilever. In order to find a new growth point and change the Chinese market situation, P&G focused on localization. In 1997, P&G made a new product strategy and began the market research and concept testing which lasted for three years. It adopted its usual methods based on scientific and strict market testing in new product developing. In 2000, a new brand Ascend (pronounced in Chinese: runyan) appeared in public with an implied meaning of moistening and beautifying hair. With target women consumers aging from 18 to 35, Ascend made its purpose as presenting oriental women's beautiful black hair. The appearance of Ascend shocked the whole shampoo market, especially its packaging, advertising image and publicity propaganda gave people great impression because of the advanced level. Ascend espoused natural beauty, and regarded women's beauty as the glinting diamond. It aimed for helping women to present their attractively moving appearance. Ascend shampoo contained traditional Chinese herb, polygonum which is helpful in moistening hair. What's more, it was the first shampoo which contained natural herb ingredient. Ascend was suitable for the Orientals because of its ingredient of Chinese herbal medicine. Attractively, a beautiful oriental girl with long black hair appeared in the creative advertisement which was designed to present black oriental hair. It fully revealed the natural beautiful concept of the Orientals. Ascend was firstly sold in Hangzhou on September 10, 2001. Hangzhou was chosen as the first target market for its potential business opportunities and modern feeling. Moreover, as an inte rnat ional tourist city, Hangzhou possessed profound traditional culture. So women living in the city inevitably owned modern and traditional feelings, which coincided with Ascend's theme. The product was completely different from two-in-one shampoo at that i time. It emphasized separate usage of shampoo and hair protector when one is washing hair. Actually , such a theme was to emphasize that the first s t ep of possessing beautifully healthy hair was to use Ascend shampoo because there’s a faith of thoroughly washing every piece of hair, and then the usage of Ascend hair protector would moisten the hair and make it raven. After being in the market for two years, Ascend still haven't taken up the marketing. Instead, Hazeline shampoo which came to the market at the same time have successfully filled the gap left by Olive Polygonum shampoo. The sale of Ascend was disappointing because its rank of popularity was not among those of the successful on the published l ist. In 2005, P&G bought Clairol which marked the failure of P&G's first local brand, Ascend. Case Analysis It is known that there are a lot of factors contained in developing products for foreign markets. In general, developing products for foreign markets should be made at the right time in the right place and by the right channel. However, according to the introduction of the background knowledge, it is obvious that there are some mistakes attributed to the failure of Ascend. 1) Primary Target Market Setting With the declining of Chongqing Olive, Ascend should have promising business opportunity. However, P&G set Ascend's target consumers as modern highly educated city women aging from 18 to 35, and positioned the shampoo aiming to make hair raven. In reality, such a consumer group is usually the most fashionable one. Though black hair was welcomed from 1994 to 2000, once the fashion concept altered, these consumers would abandon raven hair. In a word, the consumer market was not stable, which led to the insufficient target market capacity. 2) Product From 1994 to 2000, Chinese domestic fashion trend was healthy raven hair. At that time the traditional two-in-one shampoo was still very popular. However, P&G spent three year to develop new products of shampoo and hair protector, and claimed that the best way of keeping raven hair was to wash hair with shampoo firstly and then use the hair protector. The consumers' habit and knowledge of shampoo were greatly challenged. Ascend's concept was innovative at that time, it advanced consumers' hair washing habit at that time. For marketeers, if you want the new concept of your product to be accepted by the consumers, you should be certain of consumers feedback in advance; otherwise, it will go against the following promotion. Influenced by the two-in-one concept at that time, Ascend lost many additional interests compared with other congeneric products. As a result, consumers' purchasing enthusiasm was reduced. 3) Promotion Although P&G made great efforts in product promotion, as displayed in the perfect innovative video ads, distinctive public activities, considerate online promotion, and attractive sale, it also had some deficiencies leading to the choke point in marketing. 聽 (1) Advertising deviation Ascend's advertising highlighted its feature of bringing raven hair, but ignored key point, its containing of moistening herb essence which would make a great fortune. Then consumers couldn't clearly distinguish features of Ascend from other shampoo products. As a result, though Ascend had drawn a lot of attention, it couldn't arouse consumers' purchasing desire. What is worse, consumers' impression of P&G's chemical constitution was removed by the beautiful raven hair in advertising. (2) Blind online promotion Although P&G's online product promotion was innovative at that time, and is still of reference value, we should notice that some online promotion was made in online games. The target women consumers aging from 18 to 35 did not spend much time playing online games, resulting in the false belief that the high click rate was made by target consumers. At last, the high investing cost didn't get expected payback.