Abstract
Like all Asian women, I like having a very fair skin, explains a woman Chinese in front of a L'Oreal stand. With irreproachable make-up and applied fringe, this young music professor, native of the province of Shandong takes advantage of her holidays and roams the department stores of a big Chinese city. This woman is anything but an exception because according to the figures, cosmetics sales centred on skincare, represents between 40 and 60 % of the total sales of cosmetics. Indeed, in modern China, the skin is one of the main criteria of beauty of the Chinese women. As explains Zhenzhen Lan, manager of communication at L'Oreal in China, 'the traditional Chinese poetry always evokes a pure skin as some jade object as the ice '. This example reveals that L'Oreal, to win market shares has to take into account the intrinsic particularities but also the cultural aspects of each population. That is why in Shanghai, L'Oreal recently opened research laboratories, which notably work on the efficiency of these bleaching products. Generally speaking, this cosmetic firm always proves its ability to adapt to an international context by putting in practice the motto 'Think global, act local' and, for instance, by experiencing the ethno marketing. With the example of the bleaching products, we can observe that poetry is not the only factor that can explain a such phenomenon. Indeed, L'Oreal contributes to spread the western values by showing many fair L'Oreal Ambassadresses, or by betting on the French luxury image. All these points will be tackled in the following paper to understand how a firm such as L'Oreal manages to start businesses in many countries, whose cultures prevents the company from always planning the same strategy.
