Entering 2024, the transcripts handed over by the beauty care industry are remarkable, and the beauty care of domestic products is even more eye-catching.
According to Qingyan Intelligence, in 2023, domestic products accounted for the most, accounting for more than half (50.4%).
The growth rate of domestic cosmetics sales was also the highest, with a year-on-year increase of 21.1%, while Japanese and Korean brands decreased by 17% and 26.1% respectively.
On the one hand, domestic beauty products such as Polaiya and Winona are popular, and on the other hand, some beauty care brands suddenly leave.
For example, Revlon, an old brand in Europe and America, won the make-up hegemony of 200 million sales in 1998, but it could not escape the fate of being eliminated and withdrew from the China market for the second time; South Korea’s online celebrity makeup brand BBIA was once a hit in the "golden age" of Korean makeup, but now it has stopped operating Tmall’s overseas flagship store.
DT Business Watch wants to use this as an incision to study three issues through data:
Why do these beauty care brands "exit" one after another?
What did those brands that grew against the trend do right?
With the change of consumer demand and concept, what should beauty care brands rely on to compete for incremental market in the future?
In 2023, the beauty care brand "exited in a large area"
According to incomplete statistics, in 2023, nearly 30 brands closed the official flagship store of the power outage platform, adjusted their business in China, or directly announced the brand clearance and closed down.
To further distinguish between international brands and domestic brands, "exit" brands mainly have the following four characteristics.
First of all, "online celebrity Makeup", which is hot in the world, is not as prosperous as expected in China.
For example, Japanese online celebrity brand CEZANNE Qian Shili, Korean online celebrity BBIA, American online celebrity e.l.f, United Arab Emirates online celebrity Huda Beauty … They are all quite popular brands in various countries, but their domestic discussion and sales are far from "online celebrity".
In particular, Japanese and Korean cosmetics, which have performed poorly since the epidemic, have shut down Tmall’s overseas flagship stores.
Secondly, the popularity of pure beauty care in China has arrived, but the international natural organic and pure beauty care brands are "silent".
According to the data disclosed by Tmall International in 2023, the new brand turnover of Clean Beauty category increased by 236% year-on-year.
In the little red book, Clean Beauty is also a concept of makeup and skin care that has attracted much attention. With the advantages of "good color matching", "multi-use lipstick, blush and eye shadow" and "comfortable texture", the multi-purpose cream of RED CHAMBER Zhu Zhan, a domestic pure care makeup brand, has won many people’s wallets.
International brands are a little lonely. Naturaglace, American Pure Skin Care FAB and Athr Beauty, the earliest natural and organic beauty brands developed in Japan, are all famous in China.
In addition, the international high-end beauty instrument, lost to domestic cutting-edge brands.
As one of the high-end beauty instrument brands, OPTE was originally known as the "beauty artifact", focusing on the function of shading and lightening spots. The price was more than 4,000 yuan, but the official flagship store of Tmall was shut down after four years.
In contrast, double 11 Shimeguang, Jimeng and other domestic brands are threatening, capturing many consumers with an average price of about 2,000 yuan and high cost-effective gifts, and winning the TOP 10 in the sales list of beauty instruments of major e-commerce platforms.
Look at the brands that have fallen on the domestic side. More than 60% are makeup brands, and most of them areFair price cosmetics.
Relatively well-known makeup brands such as Buqi, Kale Shuo, and Joy in it were mostly established in 2018-2020, when domestic makeup brands such as Hua Xizi and Perfect Diary rose, featuring cheap eye shadow and lipstick.
They used to ride the wind, but now they have suffered a big reshuffle in the market.
Why do these brands "exit"?
Further analysis of the reasons for the "exit" of the above brands will reveal thatTheir problems mainly focus on product and marketing, that is, the internal strength and external strength of the brand.
The problem of internal strength is easy to understand, that is, the research and development of formula and efficacy does not match the needs of consumers.
The evaluation of American pure skin care FAB in Little Red Book is mixed. Some consumers complained that "the skin care effect is ok", but "there is a strange smell that has not been used much" and "I really can’t stand it after washing."
China’s beauty care market, which is full of brands, never lacks competitors. If you don’t keep up with the needs of consumers, you will directly enter the blacklist.
However,It is not enough to cultivate internal strength, but also to pay attention to external strength, otherwise good products may "die" in obscurity.
Even internationally renowned brands will be "unaccustomed" if they do not attach importance to localized marketing.
Take Huda Beauty, a hot overseas beauty brand, as an example. Its overseas official account has 50 million fans. Since 2020, it has won the top spot of the most popular brand of Cosmetify, a British beauty retail platform, for three years in a row, but it has almost completely left China within three years.
In sharp contrast, Huda Beauty’s dilemma in China may be more than the official explanation of "stopping cooperation with the operator".
We checked the operation of Huda Beauty on various platforms and found that its only direct channel in China is Tmall’s overseas flagship store, which has been closed. Although the official account of Xiaohongshu was established, it stopped updating at the end of 2021, and now the homepage has even been emptied, resulting in some domestic consumers lacking channels to understand products and brands.
Dig deeper,In the final analysis, these brands’ blunders in product and marketing are because consumers have changed.
First of all,When choosing products, consumers pay more attention to their real needs.
The most intuitive example is that consumers know their skin state better than before and pay more attention to the experience.
As mentioned above, users of TUO pure skin care brand FAB not only pay attention to the skin care effect, but also pay attention to whether it will be slippery and smell good when used.
Secondly,In the decision-making process, consumers believe in the real sharing of ordinary people and are more willing to share their own consumption experiences and feelings.
It is worth mentioning that,Many potential consumer demands are stimulated by the communication between ordinary users. They may be inspired by scene-based content, or they may be inspired by fashion trends.
For example, the gray style in autumn and winter became popular at first because of the delicate and low-key gray style, and then extended to makeup, which made many consumers have a demand for buying and using makeup products such as cold and low-saturated bean paste color, gray eye shadow tray and lipstick, and issued a feeling similar to "I didn’t expect it to be like this."
So,When brands do product research and development, they should dig deep into the needs of consumers, develop products according to their needs, and solve the pain points of consumers.
To do grass marketing, we should also be close to consumers and accurately cover the consumption decision-making field of target users.
How do those brands that grow against the trend do it?
I understand everything, but where should I start? We can refer to those beauty care brands that still occupy a place in the fierce market killing.
According to the GMV rankings of different categories of e-commerce platforms, among the "top students" in 2023, international brands include L ‘Oreal, Lancome, Hailan Mystery, etc., while domestic products are represented by skin care brands Polaiya, Yangshengtang and Beauty Instrument Miguang.
Referring to Little Red Book’s 2023 Selected Case Manual 24 Beauty Case, we found that some new domestic brands also emerged. For example, the skin care brand East Beast and pure make-up RED CHAMBER have gained a lot of achievements and popularity.
Looking back at the actions of these brands in the past year, we find that they have one thing in common-
Not only do we optimize iterative products closely following the changes of consumer demand, but we also "tailor-made" the marketing plan of planting grass in Xiaohongshu.
For example, the winter pregnancy essence of the domestic skin care brand Yangshengtang was actually launched as early as 2022, and it was not until 2023 that it was circled in a large area on Xiaohongshu, realizing a comprehensive leap in the business inside and outside the station and becoming a veritable explosion.
Word of mouth and sales are rising against the trend. How is this done? We carefully disassembled it from two stages: cognition and transformation.
First of all, according to the search of the key categories of Xiaohongshu skin care, Yangshengtang selected the sub-category of secondary polishing essence, launched the secondary polishing essence with independent packaging, and focused on this niche but explosive track.
Secondly, Xiaohongshu teamed up with authoritative media Xinhua News Agency and four powerful domestic beauty brands including Yangshengtang to jointly create Xiaohongshu’s S+ IP "Treasure Components in China".
The brand not only traces the source of natural birch juice, the key component of winter pregnancy essence "waterless skin care", to consumers through on-the-spot shooting; Also actively collected a lot of consumer feedback, so that the brand spokesperson personally responded.
We call this way of planting grass "authority+sincerity", which has two advantages.
On the one hand, when consumers are moving closer to the "component party" and "formula party", the confident Yangshengtang generously displays its scientific research technology and achievements-sincerely superposing its strength is the biggest killer skill.
On the other hand, brands take the initiative to face the sharp doubts of consumers, which is conducive to narrowing the distance between consumers and brands. Brands can also create products that are more suitable for consumers based on these real feedbacks, and continue to grow under the witness of consumers.
of course，Planting grass is only a preliminary impression in consumers’ minds, and how to change from planting grass is more crucial.
In fact, the outbreak of the sales of the essence of winter pregnancy in Yangshengtang did not soar, but was divided into a "transformation trilogy", step by step.
In the initial starting stage, pay attention to "accurate touch".
Out of the awareness of the product characteristics of Yangshengtang Winter Pregnancy Essence and the high customer unit price (339 yuan /7 pieces, 1309 yuan /28 pieces), the buyers selected by the brand are mainly professional and vertical skin care, and the goods are delivered live through the head, waist and tail buyer matrix to accurately reach the core target population.
Moreover, different buyers can cover different audiences. Fans like head buyers @ Sweet Dog @ and @ Little Dianer kini are mainly young people who streamline skin care, while waist buyers @Lingling and @ Cat Dada’s effective skin care cover luxury beauty and exquisite middle class over 30 years old.
At this stage, the transaction field of Yangshengtang in Xiaohong Bookstore is concentrated on the live broadcast of buyers, and the overall GMV quantity is rapid, and the GMV of winter pregnancy essence accounts for more than half, which has a big improvement.
In the second stage, Xiaohongshu began to help Yangshengtang and the stars join hands to "build tall buildings", initially creating a closed loop of "planting grass-transforming" in Xiaohong Bookstore.
First, Angel, the star buyer of Xiaohongshu, visited the Yangshengtang laboratory to endorse and expand the volume; The second is to bring goods through live broadcast, store broadcast and business notes, and open up different channels for bringing goods.
The effect of this is indeed remarkable.
Many ordinary consumers began to spontaneously share screenshots of their purchases of Yangshengtang’s winter pregnancy essence in Xiaohongshu, and some people specially sent notes to ask "Is it good or not?" They exchanged experience and purchase experience with other consumers in the comment area, which vividly reflected the community atmosphere of Xiaohongshu’s mutual assistance.
This community atmosphere of mutual assistance has made Xiaohongshu the main position for consumers to plant grass, and it has also become a business transaction field after consumers make consumption decisions.
At this stage, the overall GMV of Yangshengtang has tripled in a single month, and the proportion of GMV of the new winter pregnancy essence has increased to 75%, making it an ace item. The transaction channels of sales have also become diversified and rich. In addition to the live broadcast of buyers, the proportion of sales of commercial notes and store broadcasts has increased.
After the first two stages of operation, the winter pregnancy essence of Yangshengtang has basically locked in the vertical crowd in Xiaohongshu, and has the first batch of tap water users who share and support the brand, and the word of mouth has begun to spread outward.
The next step is to continue to exert different delivery channels to comprehensively improve the conversion efficiency.
At this stage, the buyer’s live broadcast matrix and brand store broadcast operations continue to upgrade, with 80% of the head and waist buyers with live broadcasts, and the number of live broadcasts has also increased six times compared with before; The official store broadcasts daily, with a daily broadcast of 9 hours; Enterprise numbers and brand partners also join the ranks of releasing product notes, and rely on high-quality content output to drive consumers to place orders.
Among them,High-quality live broadcast by buyers can enlarge the scale of their own live broadcast GMV by skin care products with high customer unit price, or feed back the brand store broadcast, and precipitate the crowd assets into the private domain of brands, forming a win-win situation.
At this point, Yangshengtang was "fully blossoming" in Xiaohong Bookstore. The overall GMV has increased by 12 times in a single month compared with the initial one; In addition to the new winter pregnancy essence, the GMV ratio of another single-product black gold limited gift box (899 yuan /18 pieces) also reached 35%.
It can be said,The popularity of Yangshengtang’s winter pregnancy essence in Xiaohongshu is by no means a random explosion of luck.
Instead, we rely on product strength, big data of Xiaohongshu, and self-closed-loop marketing strategy for buyer’s economy and self-broadcasting ecology to enlarge the advantages of brands and products step by step, so as to realize efficient transformation in Xiaohongshu and other consumption channels.
Write it at the end
Judging from those brands that "quit" and grow against the trend,The new battlefield of beauty care has been transferred to the little red book.
Turning to the 24 Beauty Case at the Little Red Book WILL Business Conference, we will find that,In addition to the essence of Yangshengtang’s winter pregnancy, there are many products in different product life cycles, which have been successfully circled and broken in Xiaohongshu.
Roye, a care brand, will continue to expand its product portfolio to match different fashion trends according to the trend of "dandruff removal" and high-end care consumption in Xiaohongshu, and eventually the GMV of the whole network will increase by 50%.
With the help of the IP of "Treasure Components in China", the essence of Nature Hall Little Purple Bottle promotes the ace component Himeyne, anchoring the component party to carry out KFS targeted crowd expansion;
AFU11 seed essential oil multiplied by the east wind of "nourishing skin with oil", and cooperated with star buyers to realize the closed-loop live broadcast of grass planting-transformation, reaching one million GMV.
As Mr. philip kotler, the father of modern marketing, mentioned in the latest editions of Marketing Management and H2H Marketing,We should conform to the communication mode of "people influence people" and return to the understanding and attention to people and consumers’ needs.
From the platform perspective of Xiaohongshu, today’s consumers are more active, and are more willing to actively discuss, repurchase and recommend their favorite products.
Including actively asking questions, collecting information → actively repurchasing → actively sharing and recommending to others, actively interacting with brands and even giving feedback, suggestions and demands.
Therefore,For brands, in addition to blindly rolling in low prices, discounts and concessions, we can also make good use of the sharp edge of Xiaohongshu to stimulate consumers’ initiative and find the vitality of brand breaking.
No matter whether the consumer’s feedback is good or bad, the brand can listen humbly first, then change it if there is, and encourage if there is no feedback.
Author: Zheng Xiaohui Design: Qi Tonghui
Operation camp: Su Hongrui Supervision system: Li Jingyu