As Western companies duke it out for a piece of the developing-market pie, Procter & Gamble is going deeper — courting not just the newly rich but also the very poor. The company’s vaunted R&D operation is turning up surprises.
We are a long, long way from Cincinnati. Getting here required a 15-hour flight to Beijing, followed by a nearly three-hour flight to Lanzhou, an industrial city on the Yellow River in China’s midsection, and, finally, a bumpy, two-hour drive deep into treeless hills the color of dried clay. Our destination, in a pinprick of a town called Shahe, is a small cinder-block house framed by Szechuan pepper trees, its primary decoration a poster of Chairman Mao. Eight of us — a reporter, a photographer, two local “fixers,” a translator, and three executives from Procter & Gamble — have come here so that we can watch a 29-year-old corn and potato farmer named Wei Xiao Yan wash her hair. Read full article.