This paper addresses the containment control problem for a group of non-identical agents, where the dynamics of agents are supposed to be nonlinear with unknown parameters and parameterised by some functions. In controller design approach for each follower, adaptive control and Lyapunov theory are utilised as the main control strategies to guarantee the convergence of all non-identical followers to the dynamic convex hull formed by the leaders. The design of distributed adaptive controllers is based on the exchange of neighbourhood errors among the agents. For analysis of containment control problem, a new formulation has been developed using M-matrices. The validity of theoretical results are demonstrated through an example.