Situation:
You are the head of global marketing for a company that wishes to enter the Chinese market with a health-based food supplement product. The product is a regime of vitamins, minerals and food supplements designed to promote vitality and health in men and women over the age of 50. Your company's product has shown significant market traction in the US, Canada and the UK to date with sales growing at over 25% annually for the last three years. Your primary distribution strategy is health food stores, organic market vendors and naturopaths all of whom appreciate the high quality approach to manufacturing the product and who sell its benefits to their clients as a result. The company's private owners are positive that if introduced in China to its more than 1 billion buyers, sales will take off! They are anxious to get started; but you are not quite so sure and see a number of barriers and challenges to entering this market that are both cultural and logistical.
Assignment:
Create an annotated PowerPoint presentation (i.e. add your comments to each slide) of no more than 10 powerful, well-organized slides that you plan to present to the company's owners to provide some insight into the challenges of entering the Chinese market with a food supplement product. Your work should acknowledge the opportunity (such as you assess it may be) but focus primarily on the global marketing strategy and your response to those challenges so that they do not naively just assume that entering this large market will be easy and generate revenue as quickly as you have already achieved in other markets. Your last slide should also address alternate markets, more similar in dynamics and consumer behavior to your existing markets, that you would prioritize for growth instead of China and compare the risks and rewards of those two different strategies.