Old Company, Modern Marketing Strategy: Lessons from Lee Kum Kee

The sauce company Lee Kum Kee, one of the best known Hong Kong brands, had a long history that began in 1888 and was run by the same family for four generations. The company was founded by Lee Kam Sheung as a small oyster sauce manufacturer in Guangdong Province, China. It relocated to Macau in the early 1900s and moved once more to Hong Kong after World War II; it remained based there in the decades afterwards. Lee Kum Kee was already expanding beyond the Guangdong-Macau-Hong Kong distribution network in the 1920s to North America, when it was also making shrimp paste. In the 1970s and 1980s, after the torch passed to third-generation leader Lee Man Tat, there was rapid geographical market and product diversification. Lee Man Tat's sons, who were educated in the West, inherited the leadership from their father in the 1990s, and the pace of modernization and diversification continued while the company's marketing strategy remained vigorous and adaptable. The company overcame a consumer confidence crisis--called the 3-MPCD crisis--in the late 1990s and early 2000s and continued to thrive. By early 2003, Lee Kum Kee had already developed more than 200 sauces. Its distribution network covered 60 countries in five continents, and its products were available in more than 80 countries. What lessons about strategic brand management can we learn from the way Lee Kum Kee developed, maintained, and expanded the reach of its products over a whole century? What lessons about crisis management does the company's handling of the 3-MPCD crisis offer?

• Marketing strategy
• Strategic planning
• Business policies
• Diversification
• Business expansion
• Business growth
• Brand management
• Crisis management
• Marketing channels
• Family businesses