Text | To consume, the author | Huanzi, the editor | Zhao
Rooted in third- and fourth-tier cities, with a matching micro-business crowd, Han Shu is well known to small-town girls.
Girls look back on their skin care makeup history, although it is completely inferior to the status of SKII fairy water and Estée Lauder small brown bottle in the hearts of girls, but Han Shu is really not an unpopular makeup/skin care brand.
At least when you are a makeup novice, you can have a bottle of foundation product BB cream that integrates sunscreen, isolation, concealer, skin care and other functions, which is a must for every girl to get started.
With a 20-year history of the old domestic brand, Han Shu became popular with a "red BB cream", looking back at the history of Han Shu's fortune, it is also a history of marketing channels with the flavor of the times.
In the era of micro-business, Han Shu won the title of "the first micro-business" with his keen channels. In the heyday of television media, Han Shu also performed quite well, and with the changes of the times, the decline of micro-business and TV shopping, Han Shu needed a new channel model.
In the context of such a question, there are two questions about Han Shu that may be worth exploring:
1. Disappearing from the Tmall Double 11 beauty TOP10 list, can the live broadcast room save Han Shu's precarious competitiveness?
2. Of mediocre products offline, after the "Red BB Cream", what else can Han Shu have?
"The first micro-business"?
After work on Friday, there is some gap between Watsons and the imaginary scene of no one patronizing on weekdays, and the successive tourists and enthusiastic introduction of shopping guides seem to be announcing that it is still worth doing to visit cosmetics collection stores such as Watsons and buy some skin care products or cosmetics.
Watsons is an important offline channel for all kinds of brands of affordable skin care cosmetics in China, Japan and South Korea, "makeup removal", "cleansing" and "toner" and other skin care products are displayed on the shelves, as long as you enter Watsons' simple inquiry, shopping guides can almost help find the brands they want, and many once famous domestic brands, if they no longer enter Watsons today, they will soon disappear in people's minds.
In the casual wandering around Watsons, the areas of "Domestic Product Selection" and "Mask Selection", HanShu brand skin care products with the "KANS" letter logo and "One Leaf" mask occupy almost the entire shelf on both sides.
With mainstream categories such as skin care, washing, men's, and makeup, this skincare brand, which was born in 2003, has not disappeared after nearly 20 years, and still survives in more than 4,000 Watsons offline stores and more than 500 offline distributors across the country.
The back wave of the Yangtze River pushes the front wave, perfect diary, Hua Xizi in the past two years to seize the domestic cosmetics key, in a short period of time out of the blue, once because of the "BB cream" popular Han Shu, and its history of the family but seems a little too traditional.
To this day, even if it is labeled as "traditional", Han Shu's limelight still overshadows the Shangmei Group behind it, as well as its main product lines such as a leaf mask and a red baby elephant.
As the first and most mature brand of Shangmei Group, Han Shu has contributed an average of 40% of the revenue of Shangmei Group in the past three years.
Focusing on the brand itself, Han Shu has a 20-year brand history, and in the Chinese skin care and makeup industry, Han Shu carries the transformation significance of the characteristics of the times. Its parent company, Shangmei Group, has explored a set of cosmetics business experience.
"From housewife to monthly income of more than 10,000, I am very grateful." At the time when micro-business was popular, from the circle of friends to the corners and corners of the Internet, there were agent advertisements about micro-businesses circulating everywhere, and the channel sensitivity was extremely high, and Han Shu was known for the title of "the first micro-business" during this period.
In 2014, Han Shu created the myth of "100 million sales in 40 days" in the micro-business channel, and the eye-catching sales data made Han Shu the hegemonic position of the annual micro-business.
Han Shu's supremacy in the micro-business world, coupled with the outside world's doubts about his "no direct selling license", has also brought him endless controversy.
Some media have revealed that in Han Shu's micro-business agency channels, there was a case of "agents taking goods less than 1/4 of the market price" cost scissors difference, agent authorization management chaos, but the fiery investment expansion, still made Han Shu's micro-business agent team once expand to 100,000 people.
The huge agent base has become a double-edged sword of Han Shu, on the one hand, it allows Han Shu to have the capital to become the "first micro-business", on the other hand, the sales model of "micro-business", which blurs the brand definition of Han Shu and also makes Han Shu's "recruitment agent" closer and closer to MLM.
The micro-business model brought dividends, allowing Han Shu to create retail sales of up to 9 billion yuan in 2015, almost close to L'Oréal Paris's sales in China. Han Shu was questioned about the "pyramid scheme" storm, on the cusp of the storm, Han Shu cancelled the micro-business division, but Han Shu still ate a wave of "dividends" - some reports pointed out.
Nowadays, the new model of e-commerce has risen, traditional micro-businesses have been replaced, and Han Shu and the change of sales channels have flowed together.
Can the live broadcast room save Han Shu?
On the shelves of Watsons products, several Japanese-wrapped masks, if not placed on the shelves of "domestic product selection", may scare many people. And about Han Shu is a Korean makeup brand? This question is thrown today and can still be asked by many people.
Like many domestic independent makeup brands, Han Shu's shelves in Watsons are still classified as domestic goods, but Han Shu, which has no relationship with South Korea, was forced to rub a wave of heat during the heyday of the Korean Wave.
Lv Yixiong, founder and CEO of HanShu, named the cosmetics brand "HanShu", and with the brand name of "edge ball", Hanshu is very popular in third- and fourth-tier cities.
This coincides with Han Shu's origin. Han Shu was born in the stores of offline direct sales channels in the third- and fourth-tier small cities, and came from a sense of "sinking market".
With the rise of TV shopping, Han Shu seized the opportunity of creating momentum and put a lot of marketing into the TV shopping channels in the sinking market at that time, which was a marketing channel that reached users with low cost and high conversion, so that Han Shu ushered in the explosion.
In 2008, Han Shu's figure continued to appear in the TV shopping channels of the "sinking market"; in 2009, Han Shu entered the TV shopping for one year, with annual sales reaching 90 million; in 2010, Han Shu achieved the first place in the TV shopping industry; in 2011, Han Shu accounted for 38% of the national TV shopping cosmetics category.
What is more specific is that in the heyday of television media, Hunan Satellite TV was once a key advertising gold distribution channel for brand owners, when Han Shu reached cooperation with more than 30 TV shopping channels across the country such as Hunan Happy Shopping.
Later, Han Shu bet heavily on the popular "Do Not Disturb", and in just two years in 2013 and 2014, Han Shu spent hundreds of millions of yuan to sign a blind date program. In 2014, Han Shu invested nearly 600 million yuan in advertising, and the sub-brand Yiyezi invested 400 million yuan, while in 2015 and 2016, it will maintain this order of magnitude.
On the road to grasping the channel, Han Shu has always had a high degree of sensitivity, from TV shopping to micro-business channels, Han Shu has seized the wave of dividends of the times.
Just as TV shopping will disappear with the TV set, the flow of channels has forced Han Shu to transform again and again. From TV shopping to the transformation of micro-business, Han Shu is perfectly adapted. However, since the decline of micro-business, Han Shu has been in the trough of the channel for a long time.
Confined to the constraints of low-end market positioning and slowing down channel growth, on the one hand, Han Shu had to face the international cosmetics group with a strong brand mentality head-on, on the other hand, in the face of the new domestic brands that are constantly rising and extremely good at Internet marketing, Han Shu did not grasp the innovative marketing channels of Xinxing.
A research report by Industrial Securities exposed Han Shu's loss of power in the new era. Since 2018, Han Shu and Yiyezi have completely disappeared from Tmall Double 11's beauty TOP10 list.
Local skin care and beauty brands born around 2017 to 2018 have also changed the "Korean playing style" of offline point expansion and begun to choose the online e-commerce world. With the rise of live e-commerce, Han Shu ended the long empty window period and waited for the next channel dividend.
In the early stage of the development of Douyin and Kuaishou e-commerce, the old domestic brands represented by Han Shu are more easily accepted by users in the live broadcast room because they have a certain degree of public recognition and Han Shu as a cheaper and larger bowl of flat substitutes.
In May 2020, Shangmei Group cooperated with Kuaishou anchor Xiao Yi to hold a special live broadcast of Han Shu & Yiye Yuezi, with a single GMV of 13.03 million yuan.
In July last year, Han Shu was driven by a wave of wild consumption due to the sensational Wu Yifan incident, and the live broadcast room, which originally had only a dozen people online, instantly attracted a large wave of traffic to place orders.
In the past two years, live e-commerce is undoubtedly one of the biggest outlets at present, and soon, this emerging industry has a rare tax earthquake, a large wave of anchors have been "banned", and live e-commerce has come to the crossroads of left or right.
The era of extensive development of live streaming with goods may be about to come to an end, and how to operate more professionally and systematically and refined may be a problem that needs to be considered in the next stage.
For Han Shu, preparing for the second half of live e-commerce will be a rescue straw to save the vitality of the brand?
After the "Red BB Cream", what else does Han Shu have?
Along the way, fancy marketing, in the face of new channel problems, Han Shu lacks brand competitiveness, and this problem comes more directly.
On the consumer side, Han Shu really has no more attractive cosmetics, once a very popular "red BB cream", now on The Taobao official website of Han Shu still occupies the "first place in the hot sale of BB cream in this store", but for young girls who love makeup, BB cream Products have long been replaced by a more professional concealer, light texture, and stronger liquidity.
As a product of Shangmei Group, Han Shu, with the same brand Yiyezi and red baby elephant, together brings up to 90% of the group's revenue.
But among the two Watsons we visited in Wuhan Jiekou and Hongshan Guanghonghui, almost a handful of consumers bought these three products of Shangmei Group.
In HanShu's product line, maternal and child care has become the second growth curve of Shangmei Group. In the first three quarters of 2021, the red elephant contributed about 22% of revenue. Retail sales exceeded $1.5 billion in 2020.
In the product line of offline Han Shu, compared with the same kind in the market, the red baby elephant does not have any sense of existence. Watsons shopping guide told us that among the same kind of maternal and infant skin care products, she recommends Qichu more because the cost performance is higher and more people choose to buy.
On the shelves, we see that the white bottle of Qichu has been sold out. The shopping guide told me, "It's out of stock." On the shelf, the three words "in replenishment" remind customers.
On the other hand, the red elephant next to Qichu, although the pink packaging is more like the skin of a baby, compared with the national brand Qichu under the shanghai Jahwa, a century-old national enterprise, consumers' awareness of the products of the red elephant does not seem to be so high, and the shopping guide also mentioned that there has not been a situation of selling out of stock.
Han Shu's brand advantage, which is not competitive, is being divided between new and old brands in the market. In addition to the new national fashion brands such as Huaxizi and Perfect Diary, even the beverage industry, which is separated by 18,000 miles, has set its sights on the business of skin care and makeup, such as "hyaluronic acid drinks", which have become a new blue ocean favored by capital.
In fact, whether it is Han Shu, or a leaf and a red baby elephant, After Han Shu "Red BB Cream", Han Shu did not create a similar big item that is remembered.
Xiao Yao, a partner at Rees Strategic Positioning Consulting In China, analyzed that the domestic beauty industry has been in a state of "well-known and no brand" in the past few decades. Many companies will only open sales channels through advertising and other means, but they have not really done a relationship with a category and clarify their positioning.
"Today, including Perfect Diary, Huaxizi, etc., enterprises have begun to have brand awareness, they hope that they can represent something in consumer cognition, and hope that consumers will take the initiative to choose and break the monopoly, but so far, in the matter of building brands, domestic companies are just starting out." She said.
Today, even if Shangmei Group walks on multiple legs, it still lacks product strength. On the other hand, the cutting-edge domestic brands, when the development of international brands are hindered, are living more and more moist. Neighboring Japan and South Korea have actually experienced the rise of local cosmetics products to replace imported cosmetics.
Compared with the top 20 local domestic brands such as Shanghai Jahwa, Baijiling and Yunnan Baiyao, HanShu's products do not seem to have a more outstanding advantage.
How to shape the competitiveness of products may be a problem that Han Shu should think about more than channels and marketing.
Write at the end
R&D and products are both online international skin care /cosmetics price reduction, guochao brand in the Little Red Book, KOL, beauty bloggers throughout the marketing. As one of the top 20 old domestic brands, Han Shu is traditionally a bit hostile.
In the product line, the Shangmei Group behind Han Shu has an average force, but Han Shu, who walks on multiple legs, is still unable to launch a large single product like "Red BB Cream", let alone create a strong product competitiveness.
Labeled "traditional", Han Shu seems to be difficult to tear off. How to get out of the difficulties of channels and products may require Han Shu to invest more effort.