Yes, that was a wise decision that Mary Kay to change its marketing strategy for China.
Why Mary Kay change its marketing strategy in china, the reason why it was mainly because the changes of china’s policy and regulation.

There were twice changes of china’s policy and regulation since Mary Kay entered into China and started to market its products through direct selling in 1996.
The first time was that Chinese government directly implemented policy and regulation to ban the direct selling in mainland in China in 1998. Because china government’s purpose was that prevented the Ponzi scheme happened in china, therefore, china government took this action to stop the Ponzi scheme and the similar things. However, Ponzi scheme was that no any product to sell to the customer and didn’t exist in the real entity liking company’s building, as well as the customers had to pay some money to the person that the customer contacted in fixed time. Moreover, this was only a kind of fraud business act.

In order to cope with the first time of change of China’s policy and regulation, Mary Kay changed its marketing strategy to match this policy and regulation that banned the direct selling in China. Mary Kay chiefly adopted two kinds of marketing strategies in the first time. One of marketing strategy was which Mary Kay chose to loyalty to the Chinese government by demonstrating social responsibility to employees. Hence, Mary Kay didn’t lay off any employees and kept them in the company in the hard time. Another marketing strategy was which Mary Kay chose to completely change the business model that was direct selling via offering showrooms, hiring salesperson and engaging in traditional retail operations.
The change of the second time was that Chinese government formulated a new law that allowed the direct selling in china in 2006. The reason why was because China joined the