Pantene Case Analysis

1.0 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Pantene brand has gone through a lot of evolution over the years and has been acquired by different parent companies before penetrating the global market. The current owner, Proctor & Gamble decided to make a way into the Taiwan hair-care market in 1990 because it was an extremely attractive market of massive size and, if managed right, could be extremely profitable.

The evaluation of the Pantene success in Taiwan will discuss the hair care and beauty industry in Taiwan during this time as an incredibly large and competitive one. The Taiwanese hair care market back in 1990 was primarily dominated by the use of shampoo rather than conditioner. There is also a very high brand switching occurrence among the young females whom Pantene will be targeting, so Pantene will take this into consideration when launching the product line.

Proctor & Gamble was faced with tough decisions between many alternatives prior to the successful launch of the Pantene brand in Taiwan. An evaluation of alternatives in the business case detailing the options Proctor & Gamble faced is shown in Appendix A.

Proctor & Gamble also had to consider their other brands currently in the marketplace, Pert and Head & Shoulders, and whether or not to cannibalize them. There were also many large competitors for the Pantene brand, the biggest one being Kao Sifone, and the marketing managers needed to establish points of differences for the Pantene brand in a large market.

2.0 BACKGROUND

William Proctor and James Gamble founded a business partnership on October 31, 1837 in Cincinnati, Ohio. With a background in the soap and candle industries respectively, the partners embarked on a then unforeseeable groundbreaking role in the household product industry. Two centuries later, Proctor & Gamble (P&G) has become one of the biggest and most viable consumer products companies in the world. It sells over a dozen of the most popular branded consumer goods on the planet with distribution in over 140 countries.

Many P&G brands are literally, household names all over the world: Tide, Ariel, Pampers, Crest, Always, Pringles, Olay and Pantene, to name but a few. Pantene in particular, was the first billon-dollar beauty brand P&G had successfully introduced into the marketplace. Swiss scientists working for the pharmaceutical firm Hoffman-LaRoche developed the brand in the early 1940s, where they discovered that the material Panthenol penetrated the hair cuticle to improve the strength, elasticity and moisturization of hair. In 1983, Richardson-Vicks Inc, a U.S.-based packaged goods firm, purchased Pantene from Hoffman-LaRoche, where Proctor & Gamble later acquired it in 1985. At the time, the brand itself had been a minor prestige label of the company - distributed through the narrowest of distribution channels.