Lolita Beauty Cosmetics Chinese Export Plan

Lolita Beauty Cosmetics Chinese Export Plan

Assignment 2: Marketing to a Developing Country

International Marketing
February 28, 2015

Lolita Beauty Cosmetics is a natural cosmetics company that plans on expanding its market to China. As the Chinese cosmetics market is proving to be one of the fastest growing businesses, it appears to be a good place for the company to start expanding internationally. In order to successfully conduct such business venture, Lolita Beauty Cosmetics has to develop a thorough business plan that will take into account cultural and legislative issues, export strategies and product adaptation as well as market research of every target segment. The goal of this plan is to propose a entering strategy that will relieve Lolita Beauty Cosmetics from taking high risks at the initial stage of products test run and also present a possible long-term strategy in case of successful establishment of the brand within the Chinese market; namely, we propose that the company proceeds with direct exporting through a retail distributor, Sephora, for a year and later evaluates the opportunities for it to conduct the business independently, including marketing and operational management processes.

Based in America, Lolita Beauty Cosmetics is a natural cosmetics company. It entered the American market two years ago by introducing a product line rich of diverse cosmetics for all target consumers. Such variety of products has allowed the company to directly test any segment of the cosmetics business market. Due to the success within their American internal market, Lolita Beauty Cosmetics has also expanded in the last few years its market to France through the distributing cosmetics chain Sephora. The American market has shown great approval of the company’s products, reason why it is now planning to extend its business to Asia, beginning with China. The Chinese cosmetics market has been steadily growing in the past few years, in particularly presenting great opportunities for foreign company investments. Taking into account the importance given to natural products by the Chinese public, together with the openings in the market, Lolita Beauty Cosmetics’s choice to embark in a business venture in China appears to be a good chance for the company to enlarge its targets.

In order to pursue our new international mission we must first acknowledge that we are entering a market that has high chances of challenging us with different issues compared to the internal American market that we began with. For this matter I have organized a research project on cultural, legal and other market-related environments that might have an influence on our business strategies abroad. Our work began with creating a checklist of all the essential information we will need, which allowed us to create a general country profile for our international destination; first, we researched basic demographic information as well as cultural diversities and customs of China. We proceeded with developing a general overview of the characteristics of the Chinese cosmetics market, study that was deepened by looking at the rules and laws that apply to doing business in China. Finally, with the intent of thoroughly preparing ourselves, we analyzed the competition we will find ourselves against to both within Belgium, thus for other exporters, and within China, which will represent our internal competitors.