Green Finger, a natural skin care brand by Yuhan-Kimberly, a leading local health and hygiene products maker, was awarded a 2010 Korea Herald Best Brand Award. 

A joint venture of Korea’s Yuhan Corp. and Kimberly-Clark Corp., the firm is well-known for its diaper brand Huggies and other hygiene products for children, women and families.

The skin care brand for infants and children was launched in 2007 after four years of intensive research and development by Yuhan-Kimberly. It offers a wide range of products including cleansers and moisturizers that are especially designed for the use of children.

The Green Finger brand has gradually become popular in the local skin care market and currently holds a 33.8 percent share as of October, according to data from Nielsen Company Korea. 

Alongside the Green Finger Baby line, the company launched the Green Finger My Kids line, for to 4-10 year olds, in October 2009. The latter’s sales have also grown rapidly and now account for over 40 percent of those of the Green Finger product line-up.

The success of the skin care brand is largely attributable to the consumer trust Yuhan-Kimberly has been building so far as well as the firm’s environmental campaign, “Keep Korea Green,” which it has been carrying out for the past 27 years, the company said.

“Though consumer trust was a pivotal factor for the success of Green Finger, Keep Korea Green campaign also played an important role to captivate eco-conscious mother consumers,” Yuhan-Kimberly officials said. 

The campaign which the firm introduced as a tree-planting one in 1984 later expanded into other environmental activities. Yuhan-Kimberly aims to plant and cultivate a total of 50 million trees by 2014.

Columbia Business School professor Bernt Schmitt, the author of “Big Think Strategy,” has also cited the Keep Korea Green campaign as a good corporate social responsibility program:

“A joining of the two areas (a corporate social responsibility campaign and the launch of new products) might provide the company with exactly the public image it needed: that of a company whose environmental commitment was revealed in the very products it produces.”

Meanwhile, with the success of the Green Finger brand, Yuhan-Kimberly has launched a skin care product line for teenagers in August, 2010.