Marketing with Mary Kay

Nathan Dalton

MKTG-1110

6/24/2015

                                                              Marketing With Mary Kay

Question 1: Is Mary Kay an international firm, a multinational firm, or a transnational firm based on its marketing strategy? Why?

To tell what kind of company Mary Kay is you have to take a look at the company’s marketing strategy. Since Mary Kay utilizes a multi-domestic marketing strategy and encompasses different product variations, brand names, and different advertising programs for where it does business. A great example of this strategy was when Mary Kay entered the Chinese market. Mary Kay realized that unlike the market in America where makeup products are welcomed, Chinese markets would be more willing to accept skin care products. Also, Chinese culture was different than American culture in the fact that they appreciated light or fair skin over tan like in the Americas. So what did Mary Kay do; they adjusted its product line and the overall message. Mary Kay started providing skin care products such as skin cream, anti-aging cream, and whitening creams. Besides the adaptation to the product types, Mary Kay also made changes on their founding principles when doing business in other countries. In China Mary Kay changed their founding principles to “Faith first, Family second, and Career third” instead of the original slogan “god first, family second, and career third” in America. It may seem like a mild comparison to Judea Christians, but it had a profound effect across all regions of their market. So it’s safe to say that they Mary Kay is a multinational company.

Question 2: What global market-entry strategy did Mary Kay use when it entered India?

The global market-entry strategy Mary Kay applied when it entered India can be summed up as three major things such as building a brand, building a sales force, and building supply chain to produce for  the sales force.

Building a brand, as part of Mary Kay’s market-entry strategy into Indian market, required Mary Kay to locate its customers and decide what prices they needed to set for their products first. As the number of upper and middle classes families rose Mary Kay found that the population would be willing to pay more money on cosmetics and skin care products for a need to feel good looking, and well-groomed. With this rise in wealth Mary Kay focused on offering basic skin care to the average middle-class Indian consumer at affordable price. After finding their customer base and the target prices, the next thing Mary Kay did to build a brand was to get there name out to the masses and did this by working with the  Miss India Worldwide Pageant in 2008 . By far though the most important part of branding was advertisement. Mary Kay did this through media advertising Mary Kay’s culture, their story, and the company image.