Learners, welcome to International Marketing and Cross Country Growth, the Capstone Project. You are almost at the finishing line. I'm here to help you get there. So, roll up your sleeves like I have. This will be the agenda. I will introduce you to an exemplar case, which here will be Yuhan Kimberly. We will get to apply four required milestones to that exemplar case. And, finally, I will offer you some Capstone tips that you can really use to polish off your project. So let's get started. Okay, what is the exemplar? Well, if you looked up exemplar in the dictionary, it means a reference. It could be a benchmark, where we look for best practices. So, essentially, we will use the exemplar, Yuhan Kimberly for you to see what they're doing well so that you can apply that in a very similar way in your specific milestone. So let me give you a brief introduction into Yuhan Kimberly. And the facts will be based on the case that I will offer you on Coursera. I do ask that only you use it because it's copyrighted. And it was published by Columbia Business School and co-authored by me and professor Bernd Schmitt and it's set in the year 2009. So it's a bit dated but, for the most part, I think the facts in that case are still relevant today. And the case focuses on their CSR Campaign. CSR here means Corporate Social Responsibility. But it's a more comprehensive case than just on CSR. And in that sense, it's very relevant for many of the milestone that we will cover in the Capstone project. Okay, Yuhan Kimberly, to give you some additional information, is a joint venture. It's co-owned by a multinational, Kimberly Clark, and a Korean firm Yuhan Pharmaceuticals, and it was established in the year 1970. So it's almost 50 years old. So, continuing on a little more background about Yuhan Kimberly, it was established, the Korean part of it, Yuhan Pharmaceuticals, in 1936, 80 years ago by Mr. New Ilhan. And he was a pioneer of business innovation here in Korea. For example, he gave his employees stock options, which was unheard of until fairly recently. And so my suspicion is that maybe Mr. Yoo, actually that's how we pronounce his name in Korean, spelled his name N-E-W because he was that concerned about always being innovative. And in 1970, that's when he formed this joint venture with Kimberly Clark to form Yuhan Kimberly and it was at a time when Koreans were relatively new to paper household products. So, again, it was a sign that he was trying to be very innovative. Just to give you a little more background about how Korea has changed, around the year 1980, the birth rate in terms of how many children couples had, the average was 4.0. So there was a concern that Korea was being overpopulated. But in less than 40 years, in fact, in only 29 years, that average has dropped to 1.2 children per couple, which is among the lowest in the OECD. So, some additional fact. If you look at the case, one of their key competitors is Procter & Gamble, also known as P & G. And I think many people know that they are this household products giant. And so, many of their products, especially in the paper category, which is Pampers and Whisper, competed with Yuhan Kimberly's Huggies and their feminine napkins. And so even though Procter & Gamble made this great inroad into the Korean market, eventually, Yuhan Kimberly, which I refer to here as YK, outperformed P & G, I think, for the most part, by having a better eye level matching, what I call Noon Nopi. Such is as we see with Huggies and their greater concern about the comfort of the user, which is of course will be the babies as opposed to the comfort for the mother. Okay, I mentioned that CSR was a focus of this case, and so, Yuhan Kimberly started this campaign in 1984, which was way ahead of the curve as compared to other companies. And they call this campaign Keep Korea Green. And the aim was to reforest Korea. The Korean landscape was ravaged, especially during the war. And so, it had taken a long time to reforest to make Korea green again and keep it that way, and hence the slogan, Keep Korea Green. And so Yuhan Kimberly was spearheading this campaign. And this campaign has been successful on so many different levels for Yuhan Kimberly, of course, first and foremost, in making Korea green again and keeping it that way, but as we can see here on other dimensions as well, such as making Yuhan Kimberly one of the most admired, most eco-friendly perceived company in Korea, way more than even a company like Samsung. So Samsung may dwarf Yuhan Kimberly in terms of sales and its standing in Korea in other respects, but especially in terms of the eco-friendly image and even in terms of the company that Koreans want to work for, Yuhan Kimberly is ahead of, not only Samsung, but other better known companies like LG and Hyundai. And you may think, so CSR, does that really help Yuhan Kimberly, aside from those dimensions mentioned? Well, at the end of the day, you want to make sure that it helps your brand equity. And so even from a brand equity standpoint, as we see with the data offered here, we can see that their campaign, which is noted as KKG, Keep Korea Green, has a positive correlation with the brand equity for both their feminine napkin called White and their baby diapers called Huggies. So yes, even in terms of helping the brand awareness or the brand value of these individual brands, KKG has been a key asset. So it is helping them sell more, not only White, but also Huggies as well. Okay, but not everything is rosy at Yuhan Kimberly. As you'll see at the end of the case, they have many challenges going forward such as the fact that green marketing, which used to be their forte, their strength, is no longer a POD, which stands for, of course, you know by now, point of difference. It seems everyone is practicing green marketing nowadays. There's also the aging of the population which I've mentioned before, a very low birth rate, which will impact directly, and in a very significant way, the main markets for Yuhan Kimberly. I mean, think about it. You need babies if you're selling baby diapers. And also, the same is true for feminine napkins. You need young women. So the sustainability of those markets are coming into question. And therefore, they need new paths to grow, to innovate, whether it's new segments, whether it's new countries, or new products. So this is all that I think is related to the themes of this course, cross country and cross industry innovation. So we will look at how Yuhan Kimberly is contemplating those new paths to grow. And so incorporate all that you've learned through the case in your own Capstone projects. Good luck.
