| Today China shampoo and conditioner market is in the phase of getting mature where competition is more and more severe. P&G, who has taken more than 50% market share, played the leading role in the China shampoo market and has developed its star product Head Shoulders for about 20 years which acted as leader and occupied about 80% of antidandruff shampoo market. In the antidandruff shampoo market, which equal to nearly half of total shampoo sales amount, Head Shoulders is beyond comparison. DHZX, FengYing or Ketoconazole Lotion are the main competitors of Head Shoulders who struggled for the left market share to survive by price and channel differentiation. However, in 2007 Unilever promoted new antidandruff brand "Clear" which aimed at Head Shoulder and planned to exceed it after 3 years. Clear performed praiseworthy in the challenge, which snatched the considerable market share and kept growing steadily. Clear developed very fast and reached almost same market share of Lux in Unilever at the beginning of 2009, which strengthen the competitiveness when faced the competition from P&G directly. The challenge case in the shampoo market from Clear brings us, especially the local enterprises, lot inspirations. To survive the fierce competition, the local enterprises chose to avoid compete face to face but to fill up the market by low price or middle-low brand strategy. While it is the difficulty they are facing that it can't be succeed only depending on the low price in the long run. Because there is little space for a low-end brand transfers to high-end. A real good quality and influential and trustworthy brand ensure the profit continuously and steadily. The Market Challenger theory was analyzed in the Clear case study in which some experience and recommendations could be summarized to those who might participate in the future high-end brand fight or those who aimed at leader and intent to be a challenger in the industry.The thesis consists of five parts. They are background and meaning that Unilever applied market challenger strategy in the shampoo market, the necessity to apply the challenger theory, the Clear case analysis, the further strategy and tactics in the second round of fight and finally experience summary based on the real case and recommendations. Each chapter's main idea and structure are as follows:The first chapter briefly introduced research background, meaning and structure of the whole thesis. What's more, the main theories including market challenger theory, competitor analysis, SWOT matrix, Michael Porter's Five Forces Model, value network and game theory, on which were the Unilever shampoo challenge case based were listedThe second chapter analyzed the now general situation of China shampoo market in detail referring to market size, market develop trend, competition structure and the change of 4P(product, price, place, promotion). The future shampoo market will be more segmental and diversify and the products will be required to be more functional and ingredients natural. P&G and Unilever are the two shampoo giants in China market who are treated as first level group and high-end products provider. With the Beiersdorf AG's acquisition of SIBAO Group, the largest local shampoo provider, and a lot potential competitors' clear entry intention, the first level group suffered pressure, especially the second large enterprise Unilever. So after reviewing and evaluating self situation, Unilever thought it's necessary to choose challenger strategy.The first part of third chapter expatiated on the market environment analysis before Unilever promoting its new brand to the hair products market. Firstly the thesis analyzed the opportunities and threats of Unilever in China shampoo market. Secondly the advantages and disadvantages were listed. Based on the former analysis, the strategies were set to take the use of opportunities and avoid or diminish the threats by SWOT model. The second part focus on how Unilever take use of the information analysis and apply the strategy which involve why choose P&G, how to choose or create the attack time, how to choose attack path and tactics. It is with the right strategy as innovation in market segmentation, right market position and intense integrated marketing communication has made, Unilever got the win-win situation at the first stage in the new product battle in antidandruff shampoo market.The fourth chapter discussed how to further apply the challenger strategies. That consisted of how the market leader, Head Shoulders, defend and retort, what difficulties Clear would confront and how to beat back after retorsion based on the analysis of the situation in the second round. Besides the new strategy could be extended to value network range in which the relations among all the stakeholders were changing, Clear's entry impacted the whole value network too, which should be fully used to redevelop and strengthen the relation with the partners to develop competitive advantage what couldn't be copied simply to keep continual competence.The fifth chapter summarized the strategies and inspirations from the market challenger and defender. From the Clear sent Head Shoulders a challenge in the antidandruff shampoo market to Head Shoulders retorted as the market leader, a lot of lessons and experience could be gained from this real case. Also the challenger and leader's actions match the game theory in some extent which gave us some inspirations too. There's much in the case that those future challengers can make use of. Finally, some recommendations were raised to help to keep Clear's healthy growth.The shining points in the thesis are the lessons we learned from the rare, real challenge between two giants in the nearly mature shampoo markets. All those potential competitors in the shampoo market or in the FMCG industries could gain a lot from this model of the integration of theory and practice. And the introduction of value network and game theory did exploration to a certain extent, in how to develop and cultivate unique competitive advantage in the process of challenge action. |
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