Colgate Palmolive

Why Colgate-Palmolive should withdraw Cleopatra

from the market in Quebec province

There are many examples of successes and failures of companies that entering new markets with new products. Every case is unique, and from each one we can take a useful lesson. Our papers is not only performing the task, but also understand the situation, and in future in our work take it into consideration, to avoid such mistakes. There is very good Russian proverb “Smart people learn on someone’s mistakes and stupid people learn from their mistake”.

The new brand of soap Cleopatra by Colgate-Palmolive was introduced in France in November 1984. As this new brand reached a high market share and was successful there Colgate-Palmolive decided to introduce the Cleopatra soap line in Canada(Quebec) and market it as the “premium quality, premium priced beauty soap.” The target group for Cleopatra soap was women between the ages of 18 and 49. Quebec is one of the largest in population and the largest in geographical size province in Canada. Most of Quebec’s population originally came from France and because of this Colgate-Palmolive decided to launch the product without any changes except packaging of product in a gold-colored carton. The advantage of Cleopatra soap from others is that it has a unique formula with the best ingredients with the equivalent of 15% beauty cream. Obviously because of this Cleopatra was marketed as a very premium product. Company decided not to offer discounts of any kind on the product. Cartons were packed 48 to a case at the price of $41.71 and Cleopatra’s pricing strategy was to be higher than Dove, the main competitor, which had always been the most expensive brand. In general soap is considered as a commodity, with few perceivable differences among brands, but nevertheless Colgate-Palmolive decided it would not launch Cleopatra like many other soaps by competing on price.

Despite the ambitions of managers the results were...