That&jos39;s no surprise for a company like Procter & Gamble, which sells hundreds of products to consumers on five continents. Not every product is created equal, and in some instances what sells a product in one part of the world could confuse or even offend consumers in other places.

Take P&G&jos39;s Olay brand. In the U.S., Latin America and Western Europe, the lotions and cleansers are touted for their "anti-aging" effects and advertised using famous women such as Argentinean actress Florencia Raggi and American Angela Bassett.

In countries such as China and India, celebrity pitchwomen are prominent in Olay ads as well, but the products are marketed with a vastly different selling point: skin whitening.

It&jos39;s a sales pitch with the potential to turn off many American women, given this country&jos39;s history with skin color and standards of beauty. In the era of segregation and even the civil rights movement of the 1960s and beyond, ads targeted African-American consumers touting products that could lighten their skin. Today, many would find this offensive.

"In North America, if you were to put a skin-whitening cream on a store shelf, there&jos39;s a load of social baggage that would go with that," said John Brownlee, Olay&jos39;s global associate marketing director. "In Asia, they have this fairness idea that&jos39;s been around for centuries and centuries."

Skin-whitening is a market so large that Procter and other global beauty companies have rushed in to compete with entrenched brands such as Fair and Lovely.

While the U.S. is still the largest skin-care market, the opportunity in other countries is growing far too fast to be ignored. In Argentina, skin care sales are expected to grow to $383.3 million by 2012, 282.6 percent above the level of 2002, according to consumer research firm Euromonitor International.

In China, skin care is expected to grow to $9.3 billion by 2012, 311.9 percent more than in 2002. And in India, a 135.7 percent increase is expected by 2012 compared with 2002.

"If you look at the population of China and India, if they&jos39;re not doing a good job marketing, they&jos39;re missing out on a huge opportunity," said Lynn Dornblaser, a senior analyst at Mintel International Group, a Chicago market research firm.

While the data illustrate why it&jos39;s necessary for P&G and its competitors to compete globally, the fair skin proposition in Asia exemplifies the company&jos39;s challenge in marketing skin care products globally. What&jos39;s considered beautiful is largely subject to regional tastes and sometimes influenced by contentious ethnic and cultural mores.

Those regional nuances affect everything from how Olay and other beauty products are advertised to how they are distributed to which products are sold where.

In China and India, Procter sells an Olay variety called White Radiance, a product that would not resonate in the U.S. because consumers here are more concerned with the effects of aging, and because even the name of such a product could reignite old controversies over race, beauty and skin color.

In India, for example, women from the north were fairer-skinned and considered more privileged than women from the south. Because of that, ads for skin-lightening lotion Fair and Lovely prompted backlash from women&jos39;s groups, said Raghu Tadepalli, associate dean and professor of marketing at Xavier University&jos39;s Williams College of Business.

But, he cautioned, the issue can&jos39;t be construed in the same way as controversial ads for skin-lightening products aimed at African-Americans in decades past.

"It&jos39;s not a racial issue, but there&jos39;s still a perception (in India) that if you&jos39;re fairer, you&jos39;re better looking," Tadepalli said.

And you can find some skin-whitening products made by companies in the U.S. Barielle, a Great Neck, N.Y., firm, sells "Porcelain Skin Whitening Cream" on its Web site.

In some instances, the message could be literally lost in translation. In China, Brownlee said, having fair skin is less about skin color than about having a smooth, unblemished complexion. But in the Chinese language, "there is no symbol for fairness. It translates as whiteness. But it doesn&jos39;t mean Anglo," he said.

Difference is Not Just Skin Deep

There are other ethnic and regional differences that affect how Olay is marketed that have nothing to do with skin color.

In Latin America, many cosmetics are sold door-to-door, à la Avon, making some women there more amenable to recommendations from their friends and family. So P&G focuses its Olay advertising there on appeals to trust and familiarity.

That proposition likely carries over to Hispanic women in the United States, said Mike Robinson, chief executive officer of La Verdad Marketing and Media, a Montgomery company that specializes in marketing to Hispanic consumers.

"They look first for trust, and familiarity is the biggest thing" among Hispanic women, he said.

Brownlee recounted a focus group in the U.S. several years ago in which Procter was studying women&jos39;s opinions on lotions. Some African-American women told of offering their own personal lotion to strangers who had "ashy" skin - a reference to white, flaky spots that show up on many African-Americans when their skin is dry.

The anecdote revealed to marketers what many African-American women had always understood: "that African-American women were always wildly involved with their body lotion," compared with other U.S. consumers, Brownlee said.

"So when we do marketing around body lotion, the language that we use for targeting African-American women is very different from what we&jos39;d use when we&jos39;d talk to a general market consumer," he said.

And just as White Radiance, P&G&jos39;s fair skin product, is sold only in Asia, Olay&jos39;s Complete line of sunscreen lotions is only sold in North America and Europe.

"Only in North America and Western Europe have you had doctors for two decades telling women that you have to put on sunscreen," Brownlee said.