Aiming at China's armpits: When foreign brands misfire

The drive to win China's consumers has had some notable failures

Unilever brought its Rexona deodorant to China a decade ago, dreaming of a market with 2.6 billion armpits.

 

Wages were rising, consumers were spending and the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics was making Chinese people feel more cosmopolitan. More of them, it stood to reason, would be open to a Western hygiene product.

 

“We had created established markets for Rexona from scratch in many countries, and we did not see any reason why we couldn’t do the same in China,” Frank Braeken, Unilever’s former China head, said by telephone from Dubai, where he now works as an investment consultant. “We had an extremely ambitious plan at the time,” Mr. Braeken said.

 

But cultural differences and simple biology — scientists have shown that many East Asian people don’t have Westerners’ body odour issues — scotched those plans. Sales totalled only a fraction of the Chinese marketing budget for Rexona, Mr Braeken said. Today, by some estimates, less than 10 percent of China’s population uses deodorant, and it can be hard to find outside major cities.

 

China’s growing consumer class has fuelled global growth and lifted the fortunes of Starbucks, KFC and a host of other Western brands.

 

Many Chinese people now drink coffee instead of tea, eat cheese and ice cream despite potential tummy tremors, and guzzle ice-cold sodas in a country where grandmothers express a mortal fear at any liquid below room temperature.

 

But the drive to win China’s consumers has had its notable failures.

 

Like tampons. Most Chinese women use sanitary pads because they believe tampons are invasive. In 2016, China spent $136 million on tampons, only a fraction of the $4.9 billion annual sales for sanitary pads and towels in the country, according to data from Mintel, a consulting firm.

 

Procter & Gamble, the American consumer products company, gave up on Tampax in China in 2000, though it relaunched the brand last year. In a statement, Li Fengting, China director for the Tampax brand, said it had reintroduced the product in hopes of attracting a younger generation of women.

 

Then there’s Weetabix. Bright Food, a Shanghai-based company, bought a majority stake in the maker of the oblong staple of British breakfasts in 2012, hoping the cereal biscuits would find their way onto the Chinese family menu. It sold the stake to an American firm five years later, after what analysts said was a lackluster performance. Companies like Apple and Starbucks have prospered in part by selling aspirational products to Chinese consumers who want to show the world that they have made it. That task is tougher for products that nobody sees.

 

“It has to be something visible or something you can smell,” said Ye Tan, an independent economist in Shanghai. “Deodorant fails partly because it is invisible.”

 

The products have their Chinese adherents. Cai Qianyi, a 38-year-old media professional in Beijing, started using deodorant in 2006, when he was studying in France. He doesn’t think he has body odour but sees a problem with sweat stains.

 

“Sweat leaving wet spots on your T-shirt in the summer is extremely ugly, especially around the armpits, which could be really socially embarrassing,” Mr. Cai said.

 

But most of his family and friends have no idea what deodorant is, he said. Once, a cousin mistook his deodorant stick for perfume and asked him why it was solid.

 

When global deodorant makers began their foray into China, they highlighted the social embarrassment caused by perspiration. Their central message was a proven winner in the West: Sweating will get you shunned socially and ruin your chances for romance.

 

That pitch fell on deaf ears in China, said Lucia Liu, a skin care assistant manager at Unilever who was involved in Rexona’s marketing between 2011 and 2016. “The traditional thinking here is that sweating is good because it helps people detox,” said Ms. Liu. “There is a marketing barrier that is really hard to overcome.”

 

Indeed, Chinese health websites have long promoted the benefits of sweating, ranging from a boost in immunity to memory enhancement to skin rejuvenation. To many Chinese, perspiration is a natural part of metabolism that should not be blocked.

© The New York Times