ABSTRACT
At 9:30 a.m. on a Monday morning in June 1987, the top managers of Hindustan Lever Limited (HLL), the Indian subsidiary of the giant multinational Unilever PLC, were gathered at HLL headquarters in Bombay to discuss the launch of Project STING or the “Strategy to Inhibit Nirma Growth.” In its over forty years in the Indian market, HLL had maintained a largely unbeatable reputation and performance history, so it was fairly strange that top management would spend time discussing strategies to inhibit the growth of a small company like Nirma. Over the past decade, however, Nirma had seemingly emerged from nowhere to overtake HLL in the detergent sector. So far HLL had ignored rural India as a potential market, but Nirma’s recent success in this area had sent HLL straight to the drawing board.
