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Foreign brands that misfire in China

While Starbucks, KFC and Apple have done well to win over China's consumers, cultural and biological differences have highlighted the plight of some notable failures

Published Sun, Feb 4, 2018 · 09:50 PM

Unilever

Beijing

UNILEVER brought its Rexona deodorant to China a decade ago, dreaming of a market with 2.6 billion armpits. Wages were rising, consumers were spending and the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics was making Chinese people feel more cosmopolitan. More of them, it stood to reason, would be open to a Western hygiene product.

"We had created established markets for Rexona from scratch in many countries, and we did not see any reason why we couldn't do the same in China," Frank Braeken, Unilever's former China head, said by telephone from Dub…