• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.185-203
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• 2009

Yuhan Kimberly, a joint-venture company of Korean Yuhan Company and American Kimberly-Clark, opened a premium diaper market in Korea by launching Pull-Ups which was pants-typed diapers in 1993. Pull-Ups was imported as finished goods from Kimberly-Clark. However, in spite of its huge market share in United States, it failed to land down in Korean market because of wrong positioning strategy which did not consider domestic customers' tastes. In 1996, Yuhan-Kimberly brought out a pants-typed diaper, Huggies-Toddler, to Korean market again. This paved the way for the combination of Kimberly-Clark's production power and Yuhan-Kimberly's marketing power and led to launch new product superior to Pull-Ups. However, this product was unsuccessful in the market because of wrong positioning which did not catch domestic customer's life styles such as cultural, environmental and habitual differences in toilet training, the cost increase coming from IMF crisis in Korea, weak trust within the company, weak trust within the company, and too much higher price than regular diapers. In 2005, Yuhan-Kimberly redeveloped new pants market business strategy. It was organically combined with winning product development plan, winning communication strategy and the market structure change through the pants market creation. Customer's habit, usage and attitude were studied with total 55 times market investigations. Also, all processes from planning to designing were executed in the customer's view by investigating product research, positioning research and advertisement research. Yuhan-Kimberly repositioned new product as a wearing diaper not as a toilet training diaper and launched Huggies Magic Panty as a premium product which had 25% higher price than previous Huggies. Huggies Magic Panty was recognized as a great hit product in domestic diaper market and the sales recorded 37.6 bill won in 2006, 57.2 bill won in 2007, and 90 bill won in 2008 since launching in 2005. The reason of Huggies Magic Panty's success was the repositioning strategy deduced from the precise check of customer's usage habit. It was the winning strategy of Huggies that were market investigation in order to survive in domestic baby goods market where a lot of companies struggled intensively, the exact positioning based on its market investigation and aggressive 360 degree communication strategy to give customers impressions efficiently.