Runyan was a new conditionerbrand launched by P&G in Chinese market in 2000, which featured itself asshowing the beauty of black hair of traditional Asian girls. Runyan claimed tohave herbals in the conditioner that could make hair darker and blacker. But itfailed just 2 years after being introduced to the market.
P&G ran multiplemarket researches at that time, including observation with target consumers tosee their using habits. They found out that Chinese people didn’t have thehabit of using conditioners after washing their hair with shampoo, sopropaganda of hair care concept may help Runyan build brand reputation quickly.
They also ran other markettests like testing the product with a small group of users and improve withfeedbacks. Package was also tested in a few malls to get feedback to improve.Advertisements were also tested with multiple focus groups to improve. They ranso many researches that the time they actually introduced the product tomarket, it was 3 years later. This was the first mistake, spending too muchtime on market research that they lost the best timing of entering the marketand capturing the market trend for herbal products. Secondly, they did dozensof market researches, but all of them took place in just one city----Hangzhou.The results came out of theses researches were not persuasive enough becauseone city couldn’t represent the whole Chinese market at all. They later foundout that in fact most of the Chinese didn’t care if their hair are blacker orlighter, for all the Chinese are born with black hair, that slight differencewasn’t among their concerns at all. What people cared more at that time was theherbals that could improve hair healthiness, rather than blacker or not, whichRunyan’s advertisements stressed on.
